Small Philosophies

These songs are a setting of poetry by a former colleague of mine, Jennifer Chang, 'Small Philosophies', from the collection 'Some Say the Lark.' There is, I think, a substantial congruity in these meditations on thinking itself and my persisting and perduring thinking and writing on the ontology and phronesis of things musical. Chang takes the ekphrastic tradition of poetry and frames that project of framing in philosophical terms.

The expansive spaces of consciousness both expose and protect the speaker: “You are a twilight / and a twilight bird,” . . . “You are a quality / and a thing silenced // by pine shrug. Stern willow. / Now run and hide in the fern" in "Phemonology". The limits of rationality are sketched via poetry's traditional imagistic project of describing nature in "Logic": “Who can grasp a lily of the valley / of the field? Every tall grass feigns wheat, and yet / and yet, rash and burn!” Finally, in 'Epistemology", the slippery nature of knowledge is critiqued yet also demanded: “I have stood in the clearing and cannot decide / if I miss the trees or if I love newborn clarity.”

These songs were written for the superb Bowers Fader Duo after decades of orbiting each other in our community, and that happy coming together perhaps is itself a small cosmological: a fourth philosophy perhaps not as small.

Complete text can be found HERE.