Arts This Week – “Bellringer”: Rita Dove and the Early Music Access Project
By Sage Tanguay
Dana Sun 00:04
You’re listening to WTJU Charlottesville. The Early Music Access Project collaborates with Pulitzer Prize winning poet Rita Dove for Bellringer, a program that celebrates the intersection of poetry and music. For Arts This week, we spoke to EMAP’s artistic director, David McCormick.
David McCormick 00:22
I’m David McCormick, and I’m the Artistic Director of Early Music Access Project, and that group does a lot of collaborative type performances with poets, with visual artists, with storytellers, and a lot of engaging with local history as well. So we are doing a concert that we’re calling “Bellringer” that is in part inspired by one of the spaces where we’re performing, which is the rotunda at UVA and a wonderful poem written by Rita Dove called “Bellringer” that is about the enslaved bell ringer at the Rotunda. His name was Henry Martin, and we have a composer, Jonathan Woody, who is setting Rita Dove’s poetry to music. As kind of a lead up to the “Bellringer” world premiere. We are playing a piece by William Byrd, who’s sort of a late Renaissance, early baroque composer. We’re taking a keyboard piece of his called “The Bells”, and we’ve arranged it for our instrumentation, and it’s just such a cool piece and a cool way to kind of bridge the gap between the early music and the new music on this program. And the other thing, which actually nobody knows about yet, because it just kind of happened. I was talking to Sam, our bass player, about which poem I wanted him to respond to with a solo and he decided he wanted to write a new piece of music. So we’re gonna actually have two world premieres on this program, which is just late breaking news.
Dana Sun 01:58
What do you want the audience to take away from this performance?
David McCormick 02:02
Well, one of my goals is to bring local history to life. And Henry Martin is one of these Charlottesville figures that, you know, he was sort of infamous in his day. You know, if you were a student at UVA, you knew Henry Martin, like personally, and he was responsible for, like, getting you to class on time. He was ringing that bell for you so that you knew what time it was. And, you know, by all accounts, he was also just a really interesting character, a really sophisticated person, and kind of lost to history. You know, there’s kind of a 100-year period or more where he gets lost from the record, and it’s exciting to kind of be part of this movement to bring him back into the history of Charlottesville. So we’re going to be at the rotunda on June 21 and there’s a 3pm show and a 7pm show that day, and at 6pm on that day, the out and about queer social group is hosting a happy hour from six to seven before that show. So I encourage folks to come out to that. Everyone is welcome to that happy hour. And then the next day, the 22nd we will be at Blackfriars Playhouse in Staunton. Folks can go to earlymusiccville.org I really encourage folks to get their free tickets online before the events. Last time we did a concert at the rotunda, we absolutely sold out. We had no more free tickets left on the day of the show. So I encourage folks to get on that task of grabbing those free tickets
Dana Sun 03:38
Come celebrate the poetry of Rita Dove in collaboration with the Early Music Access Project. Tickets are free, and more information about the event can be found at earlymusiccville.org.
Arts This Week is supported by the UVA Arts Council and Piedmont Virginia Community College. PVCC Arts presents a rich array of dance, music, theater and visual arts programming. Learn more at pvcc.edu.
