MSU music department presents 10th annual poetry and song collaboration program

Contact: Sasha Steinberg

STARKVILLE, Miss.— Mississippi State’s Department of Music will present its 10th annual poetry and song collaboration program Tuesday [Feb. 7] evening in the Robert and Freda Harrison Auditorium of the university’s Giles Architecture Building.

Free to all, the 7:30 p.m. event will conclude with a reception sponsored by Sigma Alpha Iota International Music Fraternity.

Karen Murphy, instructor and coordinator of collaborative piano, and Nancy D. Hargrove, William L. Giles Distinguished Professor Emerita of English, co-founded the interdisciplinary program of poetry and song in 2008. Previous poetry and song programs have featured Sylvia Plath, Emily Dickinson, T.S. Eliot, Langston Hughes, e.e. cummings, Robert Frost and Walt Whitman.

This year’s program is a memorial to tenor Guy A. Hargrove, who died Sept. 4, 2016. A 25-year member of the MSU music department, he performed in the United States and Europe and served for 16 years as conductor and music director of the Starkville-MSU Symphony Orchestra. He also founded and served for many years as director of the MSU Opera Theatre.

For this year’s program, Murphy will serve as the pianist, and Hargrove will give a commentary with illustrations. Singers will be faculty and students of MSU’s music department.

“We had a wonderful time choosing crowd-favorites from past programs and feel certain that the audience will enjoy this delightful retrospective,” Murphy said.

The program’s first set will feature three choral pieces performed by the Schola Cantorum Women’s Choir, directed by lecturer Gail Kopetz. These pieces are Walt Whitman’s “I Hear America Singing,” Robert Frost’s “Choose Something Like a Star” and Langston Hughes’s “I Dream a World.”

The second set will feature songs set to Sylvia Plath’s “Lady Lazarus” and “Kindness” and Emily Dickinson’s “I’m Nobody” and “Heart, We Will Forget Him.” Five songs from “Cats,” Andrew Lloyd Webber’s hit Broadway musical based on T.S. Eliot’s “Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats,” will be performed in costume. The songs include “The Naming of Cats,” “Rum Tum Tugger,” “Macavity,” “Mister Mistoffelees” and “Memory.”

The third set will include musical settings of Langston Hughes’s spiritual “Feet o’ Jesus,” “Moon-Faced, Starry-Eyed” from the musical “Street Scene,” e.e. cummings’s “I Carry your Heart,” “Buffalo Bill’s Defunct” and “In Just-Spring,” and Walt Whitman’s “O Captain! My Captain!” Other song selections include William Shakespeare’s “O Mistress Mine,” as well as “I Hate Men” from the hit Broadway musical “Kiss Me, Kate,” based on Shakespeare’s “The Taming of the Shrew” with music and lyrics by Cole Porter.  

The final set, performed in costume by the entire cast, will feature four songs from “Cabaret.” The songs include “Wilkommen,” “Don’t Tell Mama,” “Money, Money” and “Life is a Cabaret.”

Faculty soloists include Assistant Professor Jeanette Fontaine, mezzo-soprano; Instructor Ryan Landis, tenor; and Assistant Professor Matthew Daniels, baritone. Instructor Sheri Falcone will play the clarinet for “Lady Lazarus.”

Student soloists are Cori Reece, soprano; Callie Ellis, soprano; Haylee Glenn, soprano; Blake Breedlove, tenor; James Rusthaven, tenor; Christon Bertrand, baritone; Joe Lindamood, baritone; Jordan Dobbins, mezzo-soprano; Samantha Evangelista, mezzo-soprano; Grant Lackey, tenor; Kourtney Holmes, mezzo-soprano; Abby Weinstein, mezzo-soprano; and J.J. Haight, baritone.

Murphy received her doctoral degree from the University of Minnesota, joining the MSU music department as collaborative pianist in 2007. She teaches piano classes and performs often with singers, instrumentalists and choirs. She has performed throughout the United States, as well as in France, Spain, Canada and Brazil.

After 38 years in MSU’s Department of English, Hargrove retired in 2008. She continues to publish, give lectures, and teach, on occasion, in the university’s Judy and Bobby Shackouls Honors College. An internationally known scholar on the works of T.S. Eliot and Sylvia Plath, she has published three books and received numerous awards including five Fulbright grants.

For additional program information, contact Murphy at 662-325-6641 or KMurphy@colled.msstate.edu. Hargrove also may be reached at hargrovegn@bellsouth.net.

Learn more about MSU’s nationally accredited Department of Music at www.music.msstate.edu; Department of English at www.english.msstate.edu; and Judy and Bobby Shackouls Honors College at www.honors.msstate.edu.

MSU is Mississippi’s leading university, available online at www.msstate.edu.