Songs for My Father
Song cycle. As in SONGS FOR MY MOTHER, the lyrics are an interleaved concatenation of poems (two from two of my books, two previously unpublished); I wrote the musical accompaniment in 2016.
The lyrics are an interleaved concatenation of four poems: A STONE IN THE GARDEN (A Woman and a Man, Ice-Fishing, p. 25, first stanza), bars 1-13; BEDTIME STORY (The Country Changes, p. 27), bars 14-33; A STONE IN THE GARDEN (second stanza), bars 35-47; OLD MEN (not previously published, copyright 1993 by Lee Rudolph), bars 48-61; A STONE IN THE GARDEN (third stanza), bars 62-74; FOUR CHILDREN (not previously published, copyright 2001 by Lee Rudolph), bars 75-94; A STONE IN THE GARDEN (fourth and final stanza), bars 95-107.
Scored for baritone and two guitars; published and synthesized (with the voice line played by various winds) by Lee Rudolph, using MuseScore (https://musescore.org).
P.S.: Contrary to what I wrote in the first lines of A STONE IN THE GARDEN, and believed until this month (November 2024), although I was in fact born on Easter, March 28, 1948, just past noon (I have my birth certificate), it was not (as my mother had always told me) in the middle of a huge snowstorm: with Google’s aid, I recently searched the archives of the Cleveland Press and Cleveland Plain Dealer (hoping to find some good photographs to illustrate this page) and there was no snow in or near Cleveland on or near the day I was born at University Hospital on Cleveland’s East Side. For the time being, I am leaving the parenthetical comment “(As I later learned)” spanning measures 2 and 3 as is, but I may change it to “(I was later told)”.
Norman Elmer Rudolph in 1911 (approximately)