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The release of a new music and poetry CD this fall is cause for celebration, and anyone familiar with UMass Boston will feel right at home. "An Evening of Words and Music" will be held Saturday October 16 at 8pm, at the Longy School of Music's Pickman Hall, One Follen Street Cambridge. Admission is free, and a party follows the concert. The CD, Saving Daylight Time: New American Songs (Albany Records, Troy 345), features a melding of poetry and art song, with settings by composer and UMass Boston music professor David Patterson. One of the poems is "Dead Battery Blues," by Frederick S. Troy Professor of English Lloyd Schwartz, who is also a winner of the Pulitzer Prize in criticism for his articles on music. Other poems are part of a cycle called "Saving Daylight Time: Songs from a Texas Border Town," by Tenbroeck Davison, a 1982 UMass Boston summa cum laude graduate in English, whose poems here recall her adolescence spent in Brownsville, the southernmost point of the continental US. One of America's best-known and highly respected poets, James Merrill (1926-1995) wrote of Professor Patterson's music "I love your settings&emdash;so full of light and intelligence." Merrill's voice will be heard during the evening, in a 1986 tape of "The Victor Dog," one of his poems set to music by Patterson. The evening's performances will also include a remembrance of the poet by his niece, Amy Merrill. There's a UMass Boston family connection here, as well, because her father and James Merrill's brother, Charles Merrill, Jr, has long been an important friend of the University, who has supported foreign students taking their year abroad at UMass Boston for the last two years, served as a guest lecturer, and donated numerous gifts of art to the campus. Other performers who will be heard include baritone Donald Wilkinson, who has appeared with the Boston Symphony and is a regular in Emmanuel Church's famed Bach Cantata series (and a former voice instructor at UMass Boston); blues harmonica player Mark Earley, a UMass Boston Chancellor's Scholarship student; and cabaret singer Valerie Anastasio, who appears regularly at Boston's Club Café. The CD is available at Tower Records and amazon.com. For more information about the event, call 617 876-0956.
Dick Lourie
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