Tag: Smith College

Re-jiggering

Friend to bloggers everywhere, Opinionated Man of HarsH ReaLiTy and A Good Blog is Hard to Find, both of which I highly recommend you follow if you aren’t already, has long advocated splitting blogging time in thirds, one third each for writing, reading, and commenting.

It’s a good idea, although not one that I have been able to follow very meticulously.

Lately, though, things have gotten unbalanced, even for me.

I have been spending tons of time reading, liking, and commenting, but not so much time writing. I also have (many) tons of in-person commitments coming up this spring, so I’ve decided to re-jigger my blogging priorities a bit.

Step One:  I’ve separated my blog email from my personal email.

I’m hoping this will make my personal inbox easier to handle, with less likelihood of personal notes, poetry notifications, and, oh, bills and statements, getting lost in the shuffle.

Step Two:  I will also try to spend more time with posting, even though that will mean less time for reading and commenting.

Which is sad, but necessary at this point.

One of the things I am making time for in the coming weeks is my first ever MOOC,  Psychology of Political Activism: Women Changing the World, from my alma mater, Smith College. I’m hoping it will generate some posts here at Top of JC’s Mind.

Stay tuned!

One-Liner Wednesday: Writing

“Life is what makes it possible for you to write at all.”
— Patricia Skarda, professor emerita of English language and literature at Smith College, recalled by alumna Sarah Collins Honenberger ’74, when she complained to Pat that life was getting in the way of her writing (Smith Alumnae Quarterly, Volume 101, #3)

Join us for Linda’s One-Liner Wednesdays! Find out how here:  http://lindaghill.com/2015/12/30/one-liner-wednesday-this-is-irony/.

Radio segment on Alice Parker

In September of 2014, The Smith College Alumnae Chorus (SCAC) had a choral homecoming event with composer/conductor/choral arranger/champion of choral singing Alice Parker ’47.

I was pleased to take part and to blog about it here and here, with related posts here and here.

Yesterday, the SCAC posted this link: http://nepr.net/news/2015/12/15/at-90-its-still-all-about-the-melody-for-hawleys-famed-alice-parker/ on Facebook from the local NPR affiliate, featuring interviews with Parker and other musicians and clips of her work, all in under five minutes.

Alice will soon turn 90 and the celebration is on!

Poem and Art by Lorrie Lane

Lorrie Sandel Lane and I met at Haven House at Smith College. She was the class following mine. She studied English and studio art, but has made her career as a painter.

We have some commonalities in our lives. Lorrie married a few weeks after I did and celebrated her 33rd wedding anniversary earlier this year, as B and I did. We both named our firstborn daughters Elizabeth. And we both turned rather unexpectedly to poetry in our fifties.

I want to share a painting and poem of Lorrie’s today. It was posted on her literary page on Facebook, which is available to “like” as well as her art page. (See, I engage in shameless promotion for other people, too.)

Enjoy!

Poem: Lessons from Mahler

I am thrilled to announce that Silver Birch Press has just published my poem “Lessons from Mahler” as part of their When I Hear That Song series.  I am particularly pleased that they found a copy of the album cover and included a link to a youtube copy of the recording. The song about which I wrote the poem begins at about 12:40, although the whole recording is phenomenal!  https://silverbirchpress.wordpress.com/2015/11/08/lessons-from-mahler-haibun-by-joanne-corey-when-i-hear-that-song-series/

Thank you to Silver Birch Press, to Heather Dorn of the Binghamton Poetry Project for teaching me about haibun during our summer session and for giving feedback on this poem, and to the Bunn Hill Poets who workshopped this with me and helped me to make it stronger.

Also, thanks to my friend and Smith roommate Mary who took the accompanying photo for our class of ’82 yearbook. A few people remember me from way back then!Joanne - Smith yearbook

SoCS: Singing

Singing has been a constant in my life. As a child I sang at school and at church. In high school, I sang in the mixed chorus and in my final year made the Girls’ Ensemble. I could sing, do (simple) choreography, and smile all at the same time! I also was in a few musicals, nearly always in the chorus.

I really learned to be a good choral singer in college. At Smith, I finally learned to sing classical music, everything from Gregorian chant up through newly composed work. Granted, in those days, we sang Western music only. Today, I would probably get to do some world music as well. I also got used to singing in different languages. While I had sang mostly in English, with a bit of Latin, before college, I sang frequently in Latin and German, with some Hebrew and French.

For the past 33 seasons, I have sung with the Binghamton University Chorus, which is a town-gown group, meaning we have students, faculty and staff from the university, and community members participating. Some of our members are in their 80s; I know of at least one who has reached her 90s!

I hope that I will still be singing, if I am blessed enough to reach that age.

As the hymn says, “How can I keep from singing?”
*****
This post is part of Linda’s Stream of Consciousness Saturdays. The prompt this week was to begin the post with a word ending in -ing. Please join us! Find out how here: http://lindaghill.com/2015/10/09/the-friday-reminder-and-prompt-for-socs-oct-1015/

SoCS badge 2015

This month a year ago…

Warning:  I haven’t been sleeping well, so rambling is upcoming.

I’ve done some posts about this being the tenth anniversary of some huge losses in my life, but today I am reflecting on a year ago.

Last September, I sang with the Smith College Alumnae Chorus for a choral homecoming weekend with Alice Parker.  One of the posts I made afterward was about visiting the memorial tree for our friend Beth who died during our senior year and the chapel where I had spent so many hours.  I had always intended to write another post about friendship and Smith women, but didn’t for reasons that will probably become clear later on in the post. I’m hoping to give a taste of that topic now…

I love to spend time with Smith women, especially back in Northampton. It is always special to me to see my roommate Mary with whom I share such a deep connection that we pick up conversation as though we weren’t a couple thousand miles apart the vast majority of the time.

I was blessed to renew ties with two women, each named Cathy, whom I had known during my Smith years, although they were in different class years so I didn’t know them as well.  It may not come as a surprise that our best times for sharing revolved around food. Cathy R. invited us to a lovely farm-fresh al fresco lunch with her family who had travelled with her and we talked about farming and New England and family and medicine and art and photography and how some of us would have been at the Climate March in NYC that day if we hadn’t already committed to being at Smith for the weekend.

Cathy K. lives in the next town over from Northampton and invited us to her home after the concert for appetizers before going out to dinner.  Her family owns a couple of local stores that sell specialty foods, wine, prepared foods, and more. Everything was so plentiful and delicious that we never did go on to dinner but spent hours eating, talking, laughing, and sharing. Family, education, politics, losses, music, career changes, hopes, the future, new directions.  It is so seldom that one has an opportunity to discuss with such depth and breadth. I am profoundly grateful that being with Smith women so often leads to these heart-mind-and-soul-enriching conversations.

I was also grateful to have re-connected with Anne, who is a wonderful poet and who graciously accepted a copy of the chapbook I had assembled the prior year for a local contest, even though neither the individual poems nor my editing abilities were advanced enough to warrant doing so.  She sent me valuable feedback and advice and has since looked over other poems for me. She is one of my poetry godmothers!

Now, a year later, the Alumnae Chorus is coming up on a deadline to sign up to tour in Cuba next July.  And I can’t do it. Within this next year, both E and T plan to finish their master’s degrees and our travel time and resources need to go to supporting them. I also must admit that the thought of touring Cuba doesn’t really appeal to me, especially in the heat of late July.  I am such a delicate flower that I would probably wilt!

And yesterday was Grandma’s (my mother-in-law) birthday. She has a problem with admitting her age so I won’t reveal it here, but this year was especially difficult for her because last year at this time we were in the throes of trying to determine what was wrong with her back. It turned out that an osteoporotic compression fracture in a vertebra led to its collapse and a long year of pain and complications and medications and therapy and ups and downs. Well, a lot more downs than ups.

Her elder son and his daughter came to visit for the weekend, which was nice, but it also was a reminder of how much she can’t do anymore.  Grandma was trying to wish away the last year, which is painful to watch.

It’s also a reminder of how stressful the last year has been. Exhibit A:  my outbreak of shingles last December. Lucky for you, I’m not going on to the rest of the exhibits. I am doing better with giving myself a bit more distance, but it is still sad and concerning and draining.

Especially in September.

I’m working on getting myself back into a better place. I actually managed to sleep a five hour stretch last night.

I’ll take all the progress I can get.

Dessert Is Not the End, poem by Anne Harding Woodworth (MY SWEET WORD Series)

I am so happy to share a wonderful poem from Anne Harding Woodworth. I met Anne when we were both singing with the Smith College Alumnae Chorus, touring in Sicily. When I started to write poetry, Anne generously shared advice and tips with me. I am so excited that she has a poem in this Silver Birch Press series because I will also have a poem of mine featured at some point in the coming weeks. I’m honored to be included with such an accomplished poet as Anne.

silverbirchpress's avatarSilver Birch Press

Harding Woodworth
Dessert Is Not the End
by Anne Harding Woodworth

The night we made s’mores
our lives slid into each other further,

closing the gap of our childhoods—
parallel lines distanced by miles

of prairieriversandgreatlakes over separate campfires,
separate hearths in those days. Yet there was a sharing

of chocolatemeltedmarshmallowandgrahamcrackers.
An uncomplicated recipe is not forgotten—

like the taste of coalescence, a sliding
of something into an opening, sweet, dark and light,

soft and heated and held within sturdy walls—
you and me, at last folding the child

into the story of all these years—
and wishing for s’more, just a few more.

PHOTO: Anne and Fred in the 1950s. They did not know each other as children.

Anne Harding Woodworth (5)

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Anne Harding Woodworth is the author of five books of poetry and three chapbooks. Her persona poems in the voice of a woman who dreads being confined in her old…

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Paul Goldstaub tribute concert

On January 31st, the Music Department of Binghamton (NY) University presented a concert of Professor Emeritus Paul Goldstaub’s music on the first anniversary of his death. It was wonderful to hear such an eclectic mix of Paul’s music, much of it performed by the musicians who had premiered it.

I found my mind going back to my own studies of theory and composition at Smith. At that time, we began our theory course sequence in a contemporary setting with the study of rhythm, timbre, and melody, before progressing in later semesters to common practice period harmony, counterpoint, and chromatic harmony. The concert opened with a fugue for 3 snare drums, which included some air drumming and left us wishing that we could have seen the score to see how Paul had notated it. The second half of the concert opened with Pastorale II for flute and digital delay, played by Georgetta Maiolo. I loved how it wedded wonderful melodic writing with contemporary technology, with the digital delay taking the place of what would probably have been done by tape in my student days.

I also appreciated that Paul wrote for so many different instruments and combinations. In the concert, there was a piece for trombone and piano and one for marimba and piano. Hindemith came to mind. The concert program included a full list of Goldstaub’s composition, arranged chronologically, which allowed us to appreciate the full scope of his range as a composer.

Paul’s inventiveness as a composer was on fullest display in the excerpts from Every Evening for baritone, a chorus of three sopranos, piano, and percussion duo. Before each movement was sung, the poem was read by Professor Emeritus Martin Bidney, who had translated them from Russian, into which they had been translated from the Spanish folk tradition. The settings that followed had an incredible richness of soundscape, including some pitched speech reminiscent of Sprechstimme, close harmony from the three sopranos, and dialogue between the baritone and varied combinations of the sopranos.

As a member of a chamber chorus drawn from the Binghamton University Chorus, it was my privilege to participate in the final piece on the program, the first movement of Shakespeare Mix, which Paul had written for us in 2002. Accompanied by two pianos and percussion, we sang from Twelfth Night, “If music be the food of love, play on.” As we finished, a photograph of Paul was projected on a screen beside the stage. As the ovation went on, it was good to know that we had all joined together that evening to make sure that Paul Goldstaub’s music does “play on.”

Visiting chapel and Beth’s tree

Mary, Tricia, and I with Beth's tree next to Helen Hills Hills Chapel, Smith College
Mary, Tricia, and I with Beth’s tree next to Helen Hills Hills Chapel, Smith College

After the Alice Parker concert at Sage Hall, Mary, Tricia and I proceeded up the hill near Paradise Pond to Helen Hills Hills Chapel.

Our first priority was to visit the winter-flowering cherry tree planted beside the chapel that is dedicated to the memory of Beth McBeath, another class of ’82 Glee Club member, who died as the result of an airplane fire during October break of our senior year.  Her funeral was held at the chapel and Glee Club sang Bach’s setting of “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring” through our tears during the service.  Later, I attended the planting of the memorial tree, although the tree in the photo is not the original tree but a replacement for the one we planted that day, a weeping cherry that was unrecoverably damaged in an ice storm years later.

Beth was a light-filled, infectiously joyous person. She served the Ecumenical Christian Church (ECC) at Smith as a deacon and liturgist.  She participated in the Smith choral program in all her years there, serving as an officer as well as lending her alto voice to our choirs.  In the best tradition of the liberal arts, she studied with both breadth and depth, including taking a course in the art department on bookmaking.  She was always friendly and interested in other people.  Like me, as we entered our senior year, she was engaged to be married.

Her loss, along with another classmate who died from lung cancer later in our senior year, taught us not to take time for granted.  Her memorial tree is something that I try to visit every time I get back to campus. I make donations to the Smith Fund in her memory, which puts me in touch with her mom, who still survives.  Mary sent the photo, which we took with her phone, to Beth’s mom.  I hope it made her smile.

After visiting the tree, we went into the chapel.  None of us had seen it since the pews were removed, although we had seen a photo in the Smith Alumnae Quarterly.  Despite that, it still was a bit of a shock to walk through the front doors of the chapel, which was modeled after a traditional New England Congregational style church, and not see the rows of white-painted wooden pews with the red center aisle carpet down which I had walked as a June bride a few weeks after our commencement.  Instead, there were heavy, boxy wooden chairs, arranged in circles over a wood floor.  Given that there are no longer regular worship services in the chapel, a fact that still makes me sad, I do understand the impetus to remove the pews to make the space more versatile for concerts and other events, but I wish that the wood floor had been a traditional New England hardwood and the chairs had been more elegant and in keeping the architecture.

Still it was better than the last time I had visited chapel in May 2012, when I wrote this poem that touches on both the chapel and Beth’s tree. chapel at reunion  (Sorry for the pdf embedding, but I didn’t have time to fiddle with the editing settings to get the indents and spacing to work correctly.)

After walking through the main body of the chapel, we went upstairs to the gallery and visited the organ, which was a memorial gift in honor of Helen Hills Hills’ husband James. I spent so many hours on that bench, practicing, having lessons, accompanying for Choir Alpha, playing for Mass, prepping for my junior recital with Mary and Natalie, preparing for and playing preludes or postludes for ECC services, and additional hours standing beside the bench turning pages for other organists.  It’s moments like this when it feels odd that I haven’t played for years…

We also walked to the basement where the offices are. Almost every room has a different occupant or purpose than when we were there.  I thought about the series of Marc Chagall prints that used to hang in the hallway.  I think the art museum took custody of them so that they are in a better protected environment, but it used to be so cool to have original artworks in an everyday space. The Bodman Lounge is still there, with shelves of spiritual and religious books and couches and comfy chairs.  Mary had given me a bridal shower there and it was the room in which I dressed for my wedding.

I felt reluctant to leave. Even with all the changes, the richness of the memories will always draw me back.