Humans

• Peter Longofono (author)
• Daphne Taylor (artist)

Page count

48

Keywords

Poetry, Music, Sound, Music Theory, Jazz, Performance, Composition, Of Sound Mind

Publication date

2016

Language(s)

English

Publication media type

Print Document
Chapbook

Publication series

Unlimited Editions

Chords

This work aims to represent chords subjectively as an assemblage or family of characters, with each chord corresponding to a single poem and each character corresponding to a representative tone (“One,” “Three,” “Five,” etc.). Though the poems make use of historical, analytical, and academic registers, this is not intended to be a comprehensive undertaking. These are poems first and foremost, and decisions have been made accordingly to emphasize sonic and/or semantic textual elements over absolute musicological fidelity.

Chords comprises thirty poems exploring how musical chords resonate: sonically, structurally, historically, pedagogically, and symbolically, for starters. Conceptually, Peter approaches the poems from a jazz perspective, skewing pragmatic in an attempt to render each chord as it feels to him in his performer’s mental shorthand. Each poem corresponds to a single chord type, depicting representative tones as characters in conversation and competition with one another. The poems hold to one another in the compositional sense, approximating a chord progression of sorts as increasingly complex tone relationships emerge. As befits the aural subject matter, the reader is encouraged to declaim the poems after a few silent reads in solitude for the full effect.

About the Contributor(s)

Peter Longofono's poems have appeared in H_NGM_N, fields, Luna Luna Magazine, Public Pool, and Tenderloin, among others. He makes music with Gillian, Continue, and Charmers. He lives in Brooklyn and Guadalajara.

Daphne Taylor was born into a Philadelphia Quaker family with historic roots reaching over two hundred years. As an undergraduate at Rhode Island School of Design, she studied ceramics and developed her love of craft traditions. While working on her MFA in painting at the University of Pennsylvania, she continued her lifelong discipline of drawing, which to this day, influences stitching patterns in her quilt work. Her close association with the Quaker traditions is a strong influence in her life and work. The curious and profound silence of a Quaker meeting can be felt in the patient, meditative lines of her quilts. Her compositions also frame challenging relationships of colors and other formal tensions, suggesting that there is never an easy or obvious blueprint to her quilts. Like the complex silence felt in a Quaker meeting, the world within Taylor’s quilts is hardly a straightforward place. Taylor taught for over thirty years in New York City and now lives in rural Maine.

Cover Art: Quilt Drawing #13 - For Maureen by Daphne Taylor, 2010
Series Designed, Edited and Curated by Elæ Moss.