Voices Up: New Songs, Modern Poems

Fordham University’s Voices Up series invites composers who live in or near New York City to submit songs for performance on Friday, March 11, 2011, at the university’s Lincoln Center Campus. Voices Up (inaugurated earlier this year) is an annual event combining new song compositions with readings of the poems involved. Normally the poems are also new and read by the poets, but for 2011 the songs will draw primarily on the poetry of Hart Crane, in conjunction with the publication by Fordham University Press of the first critical edition of Crane’s masterpiece, The Bridge.

Composers may submit one or two newly composed songs for tenor and piano to any text by Crane. Poems published by Crane before 1923 are out of copyright and may be used freely; those published after 1923 require permission from the publisher, W. W. Norton. Alternatively, composers may submit one Crane setting and a setting (also for tenor and piano) of an extract from the work of James Joyce.

The songs submitted may be of any duration; we will choose up to twenty minutes of music to complement music already programmed.

Please send either a PDF of your scores together with a MIDI realization, or Finale .MUS files of the score (in Finale 2010 or earlier) to voicesupseries@gmail.com between November 5 and December 5, 2010. If your MIDI file is larger than 10MB, please use a delivery service such as Dropbox or YouSendIt. Notification of results should go out by early January. Your e-mail should also include a brief biographical sketch.