Plenty of musicians have drawn inspiration from famous poems. “Golden Slumbers” by the Beatles, for example, was based on a lullaby by Elizabethan poet Thomas Dekker. But while lots of musicians have been inspired by writers like Walt Whitman or Emily Dickinson, they probably never got a chance to actually talk to them. A new collaboration between the Center for Poetry at MSU and the MSU College of Music is giving musicians a chance to actually interact with their poetic muses.Students in the composition department were matched with local poets and wrote pieces of music inspired by their work.
Current State host Mark Bashore talks with two of the artists who worked on the project. Philip Rice is a Ph.D student in composition at MSU, and Cindy Hunter Morgan is a local poet and lecturer in the English department.
Rice performs his original piece at the “Voicing Poetry” concert this Wednesday at 7:30 p.m. in the RCAH theater at MSU.