Parker Ramsey

Parker Ramsey about the program: "As an harpist and instrumentalist, I’m always fascinated to see how composers shape and interact with the texts that inspire them. In the Renaissance, madrigals or motets based on biblical stories were used to teach students to improvise and in tandem instill lessons of morality and virtue. Later in the baroque, Gregorian chants were treated as seeds of germination by the likes of Frescobaldi as from which contrapuntal fantasias were crafted. In the era of programmatic music, poems were treated as narrative frameworks within which composers such as Fauré would fit musical ideas. In the 20th Century, we see instances of silent poetry, such as with Paul Hindemith, who set an obscure poem by Hölty which was meant for the harpist’s eyes, but perhaps nobody else’s. In Words Unspoken, I’ve gone back and chosen some of my favorite harp works I learned as a student and paired them with the solo movements from Nico Muhly’s The Street, a setting of the Stations of the Cross by poet Alice Goodman."