I’ve been working with the multi-talented American composer, Tim Risher for a few years now. It’s been both stimulating but also, great fun. Most recently, we worked together on a new song cycle for tenor and piano (Fibonacci Poems) and before that we’ve also worked on short animated films which combined my poems with music and pictures.

Now Tim has brought out an music album of some of his work for music and voice and I’m honoured to have a place on there where he has sampled my voice as part of the composition. Three of my poems are given the Risher treatment but there are other interesting tracks too where he plays with the possibilities of mixing the spoken word with music.

You can buy the album here:

https://paragate.bandcamp.com/album/music-of-the-spheres

You can watch the film of one of my poems, Haiku, here.   The album has a remix of this and of our other collaborations. I never thought I’d release an album, so many thanks to Tim for making me sound almost like the real thing.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z_0TzHGBK3k&t=8s

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Some time ago, I could’ve sung these lovely songs written by the American composer, Tim Risher, but these days I restrict my vocalising to the shower or anywhere else where I can be sure that I’m alone. When I was a young tenor studying classical music, I would never have guessed that one day a composer would actually set my own poetry as a song cycle. I studied Schumann’s Dichterliebe and Schubert’s Winterreise at music college and I still know those great song cycles by heart. It is truly thrilling to have, in all humility, helped add another song cycle to the canon of works written for voice and piano.  It’s even more exciting now that I’ve seen the great job that Tim has made of a set of my Fibonacci poems.

Tim Risher has set some of my poetry before and we seemed to understand each other, and trust each other enough to decide to collaborate on a bigger project – actually, as far . was I’m concerned, it had been a dream of mine. I have now written well over 100 of these little poems based on the Fibonacci numerical sequence and 73 of them have been published in the Fibonacci specialist journal, The Fib Review  http://www.musepiepress.com/fibreview/

When Tim suggested setting a group of them as a song cycle, I said that he should go to The Fib Review and choose which of mine he would like to use.  He made his selection and it was fascinating to see which ones he went for and also how they all came together to say something more than their individual parts.

Tim Risher

Tim has a gift for reading beneath the words in poetry and I have been really impressed by how he’s seems to have entered my psyche and found aspects in the poems which I’d thought well and truly buried. He has created a song cycle which I find deeply moving whenever I try to play it through at home (alone!).

Now Tim is looking for both a suitable tenor (with the range needed for the Schubert and Schumann songs)  and a suitable pianist who could bring this very 21st century classical cycle to life on stage and in a recording. I can’t wait to hear the result.

Tim Risher has a considerable body of work to his credit and his versatility is obvious as listed on wikipedia:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Risher

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Here it is:

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My thanks are due to the multi-talented Joseph Nussbaum for his film, so carefully made, of my poem Silent House. It was a great experience sharing brains with such a perceptive director. It’s great when that solitary poet life can be shared like this.  I loved Tim Risher’s music too. Here are a couple of stills and, below, a copy of the film. Hope you like it…I shall be keeping it, with the other films of my work, in the video column on the right of this page

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My prose poem, On Gloucester Road, has had an interesting life so far. I wrote it after being contacted with the Moscow-based American publisher, Marco North who was compiling an anthology and asked me if I would write him a prose poem.

 I told him I didn’t really know what a prose poem is but he was very kind about my writing here on these blogs and insisted that I should try my hand at one.  Well, thanks to the charismatic and highly persuasive Marco North, the poem was born and published in a splendid collection called In The Night Count The Stars Night  published by Bittersweet Editions http://www.bittersweeteditions.com/

Recently, I was approached by another persuasive American, the Californian composer and film-maker, Tim Risher, who said he’d like to make a short animated film of the poem for which he intended to write the music too. So my poem has born again, this time as a movie made with the computer graphics as supplied by the vibrant artistic community from the virtual computer world, Second Life, where I do weekly poetry events under the name of Wolfgang Glinka. Tim Risher has a presence there too as Joseph Nussbaum. Here’s a link to his other music:  http://www.wehrs-music-house.com/?page_id=613

Tim Risher (aka Joseph Nussbaum)

 

 

This is my third collaboration with Tim and i’m really pleased, yet again, with the results. You can see the others on the right hand column of this page. The film is out on YouTube today. Here it is – hope you enjoy your dinner at Sloppie Joe’s.

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I was very happy to see a fine new animated film, Haiku, by my friend, the talented American composer and film-maker, Tim Risher (aka Joseph Nussbaum).  It was exciting that it was based on one of my poems, Haiku. It’s terrific when poetry, music and film come together like this. This is the second of my poems to be made into a film but, in the nature of Haiku, this one’s only short so give me a moment of your time and take a look – it’s wonderful:

See the other poem film, Sortie, also with music by Tim Risher, directed by Boris Twist – there’s a link in the left column on this page.

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