Song of a Reformed Headhunter

I have 3 poems in the beautifully designed this/that/lit , thanks to Abayomi Animashaun. It was such a surprise to me to find a fellow Singaporean in the NYC private school where I teach. Phillip Cheah has been such a blessing to me, and others, through his friendship and his music, and I really wanted to write about his journey from the US to Singapore and back to the US. W.'s story is also extraordinary. Who would have thought that, raised to be so pragmatic as we were, that a Singaporean would marry in February, graduate in May, and adopt two boys in June. Well, W. explained that his Singaporean upbringing actually trained him for it, although the upbringing did not prepare him for the pains of early fatherhood. Finally, the poem I wrote for Zizi Azah's graduation from her MFA program is also here. The news that Broadway will be closed until the end of the year is devastating, but we writers and artists must remain strong and be in solidarity. Enjoy the poems !

Saturday, conducted a Sing Lit Station workshop on revision with three participants. Andrea, an intern, made a valuable addition. Then attended the Migrant Poetry Evening at The Arts House in the tank top designed by Mark Yeo. With Cyril Wong With Annaliza Bakri On Sunday, I heard Phillip Cheah perform at Victoria Memorial Hall (Dance Studio) with his collaborator and pianist Trudy Chan. They were terrific, as expected. Phillip is a good interpreter of art songs. I found the French tunes the most affecting in their combination of lightness and emotion. Many of Phillip's former teachers and classmates from RI came to support him. In the evening, I had dinner with YP and her family at Chapter 55, an Italian bistro in Tiong Bahru. The girls liked their presents. Hannah got an autographed copy of Naomi Novik's Temeraire series. She is beginning to collect books signed by their authors. I found the perfect present for Liesel at the Asian Civilization Museum, a book of...

The Cheah Chin Duo presented a concert of love songs yesterday afternoon at the Church of Saint Luke in the Fields. Trudy Chan and Conrad Chu were on the piano, with soprano Kathleen Cantrell, mezzo-soprano Catherine Hedberg, tenor Dennis Tobenski and bass Phillip Cheah. They presented Brahms's Liebeslieder , Op. 52, and Neue Liebeslieder , Op. 65, and John Corigliano's Gazebo Dances (1972) (Waltz and Tarantella) and Liebeslied (1996). Also influenced by Brahms was the middle set of art songs by American pianist and composer Stephen Hough. Other Love Songs (2010) set to music poems and texts by Claude McKay, Julian of Norwich, Langston Hughes, Laurence Hope, A. E. Housman and the Gospel of John. I especially liked the musical setting of Housman's poignant poem "Because I liked you better." Because I liked you better Than suits a man to say, It irked you, and I promised To throw the thought away. To put the world between us We parted, stiff and dry; ...

Last Thursday GH and I heard a concert of French sacred music in the beautiful gothic church of St. Ignatius of Antioch at West End Avenue and 87th Street. Under the music direction of Phillip Cheah, the Central City Chorus presented à la glorie de Dieu . The program connected medieval French composers with their modern counterparts. According to the program notes,  La Messe de Nostre Dame by Guillaume de Machaut (ca. 1300-1377) is often cited as the earliest complete setting of the Ordinary of the Mass attributable to a single composer. Cheah writes, to my great interest: The text of the Ordinary falls into roughly two categories: one short, with the conciseness of poetry (i.e. Kyrie , Sanctus , and Agnus Dei ), and the other extended and prosaic (i.e. Gloria and Credo ). Machaut sets the texts of the former group as self-contained abstract formations that seem almost more instrumental than choral in the drawn out syllables, while the latter are set in accordance with the t...