I was Artist-in-Residence at Fir Acres Workshop in Writing & Thinking at Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Oregon, in the summers from 2006-2010 at the invitation of Program Director Robert D. Whittemore. My role was to introduce musical composition into a community principally concerned with the written word. How could we become more sensitive to the sound as well as the sense of our words? What is the intersection between language and music? What is poetry and what is lyric? In the well-appointed Mac lab on campus, we did extensive work on rhythm, and explored the way placement of words on the scaffold of beat could change the meaning of the words themselves.
In 2009, the workshop theme was “Beyond Blame: Authority, Creativity, and Plagiarism in the Digital Age.” In a community project entitled “Beyond the Sincerest Form of Flattery: Imitation as Creative Act,” a dialogue was started and the pieces (below) were produced. Rather than approaching the work in proscriptive terms, the requirement for each of the young writers was to bring “a favorite book, song or other work” from which to draw material for creating a new musical piece. The results were highly original, or at the very least different from the source of inspiration.
