Read a recent review from Sequenza 21.
Read a recent preview article from Sequenza 21.
Read a recent review of Music/Words from Lucid Culture.
Music/Words is an interdisciplinary live performance series founded by NYC-based pianist Inna Faliks, exploring connections between poetry and music by presenting collaborations between exciting solo musicians and acclaimed contemporary poets in the form of a live recital/reading. Inna Faliks created the series in order to foster a chance for poets and musicians to work together and inspire each other, as well as to allow different audiences to come together for these musical-literary events. New published and unpublished works are read alongside performances of music old and new and connected by content, intuition, and inspiration. According to Faliks, “I pair performers together based on their personalities and styles, and encourage them to pair the poems with music in ways that are strongly and intuitively connected.”
Music/Words invites the audience to be moved by free associations, interplay of moods and genres and different mediums. Inna often found herself reading poetry before going out on stage to play a concert. Having grown up on a diet of Russian poetry, she studied and wrote poetry for years before deciding to incorporate live poetry into her performances though Music/Words. She and renowned poet Jesse Ball performed in the first Music/Words, in 2008, when he read from his Parables and Lies narrative poems series, between movements of the Brahms f minor sonata performed by Faliks.
Since then, Music/Words has developed an on-going dialogue between poets and musicians, and has featured some of the country’s most important poets, such as Mark Levine and Deborah Landau, and musicians such as cellist Wendy Warner and pianist Angelina Gadeliya. Now in its fourth season, and supported in part by the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, Music/Words has been seen in Le Poisson Rouge, Cornelia Street Cafe, Chicago’s Pianoforte Series and on WFMT classical radio in a yearly series of broadcasts. Music/Words emphasis is on living poets, with music that ranges from pre-Baroque to new.
This year’s performers include poets Tom Thompson, Cecily Parks, and Irina Mashinsky, and pianists Inna Faliks, Dimitri Dover, Clarice Assad, and singer Samantha Malk, with music ranging from CPE Bach to Brazilian improv. Performances will be held at Yamaha Artist Services, Gershwin Hotel, Cornelia Street Cafe and on WFMT radio in Chicago.
2012-13 season’s news: a Music/Words commission project, world premiere of Songs of Nature by John Eaton, with David Adam Moore and Inna Faliks, collaborations with Poetry Foundation, Chicago and much more – stay tuned!
