I would like, first, to describe the mode of composition I employed, and secondly, to explain the album’s subtitle, “Being variations on themes from Of Real Things.”

Composition and Recording
With the exception of a couple of tracks that feature the soprano Lydia Sharp, Rendered into Song is all me. That is, I wrote the songs, performed all the parts, and mixed and mastered the recording. No autotune, no prefab beats, no AI. The word “performed” requires me say something about recording in the digital age. Two different techniques coexist these days, analogue and digital. The first of these is familiar, I suppose, though it would be more accurate to call it “digital recording of an analogue source.” It originates with singing into a microphone or plugging a guitar into an amp. It’s exactly the same thing as a voice mail or an mp3. Indeed, all the vocal and guitar parts live in my computer as (digital) .wav files.

Digital recording of a digital source is a different matter. The drums on Rendered into Song are a good example. I don’t “play” the drums any more than I “write” this document using a quill (or gel) pen. Just as I am using word processing software right now, I use “music processing” software–a MIDI editor–to compose the drums parts and the synth sounds and bass sounds and orchestral sounds and so forth. Some of these sound sources have been digitally synthesized, and others–notably the drums–are digital recordings, stroke by varied stroke, of an analogue source, say a snare drum. Some clever musician has gone into a studio and made the various strokes–rim shot, rim click, center strike, etc.–on one of dozens of precisely identified snares, Ludwig, Gretsch, Premier, whatever. Same for kick, ride, crash, high hat. Same for synth, bass, piano, organ, and the BBC orchestra. In the MIDI editor, which looks like a player piano roll, I laboriously painted in the each kick stroke, snare stroke, and clarinet note.

This is what I mean by “no prefab beats.” You can download beats, but I created all of them myself. I can’t play drums, but after many decades in rock bands, I understand drums. Thus, you might recognize the drum break in Thanks but No Thanks as the beat from Get Off My Cloud, which I stole from the Rolling Stones. (The Stones stole it from Rufus Thomas, and the Specials stole it from the Stones, as I did.) So I put it together like a drummer playing a kit. I also put together more experimental bits, like the free-form instrumental interlude in Animals Think. So it’s me. Except for Lydia Sharp, an outstanding artist in her own right. She (times 6) does the backing vocals on Agoraphobia. And she performs two of the stanzas in Empire, my setting of the William Blake poem, “The Tyger.”

Variations on Themes
3 ½ hours of cinematic background music accompany my reading of the long poem Of Real Things. The music features a technique, common in the movies, called leitmotif. A leitmotif is a brief musical phrase that accompanies and to some extent identifies, or at least calls attention to, some character or situation. Thus, in the Star Wars saga different leitmotifs accompany, say, the winsome Princess Leia or the evil Empire. Unlike most movies, Of Real Things is not a narrative–it’s not a story or an epic. Accordingly, the leitmotifs in that long poem link to psychological and philosophical themes.

I can’t reasonably expect people to make an investment of 3 ½ hours in a work of mine. Don’t get me wrong, I think it’s really good, but I accepted long ago that poets might find at best “fit audience though few.” Nevertheless, an investment of a half hour would I believe clarify the debt of Rendered into Song–”Being Variations on themes from On Real Things”–to the bigger poem. I suggest that you listen in On Real Things to chapter 5, “An Ode on Bacchanalia,” and 20, “Fallen and Again Fallen.” The former represents a detailed description of the Dionysian frenzy depicted by Titian in Bacchus and Ariadne. The latter, simplifying somewhat, describes the dreadful consequences of alcoholism in real life–my real life–and offers some hope of redemption. So those two chapters kind of bookend each other.

Quite a few leitmotifs from Of Real Things make their way into the new album–hence the title Rendered into Song. In the two chapters I have mentioned, you can hear melodies that reoccur in virtually all of the fourteen songs on Rendered. I will discuss one of them.

The Ode on Bacchanalia begins with a bacchic chant; I made up the words Yay Akoi. After this chant abruptly ends, we hear, played on an oboe, the most prevalent musical theme in Rendered into Song, a theme I call the goatboy. The painting Bacchus and Ariadne overflows with bizarre images, none more bizarre than that of a small child with the legs of a goat dragging with rope the severed head of a doe. This image bespeaks the uncomfortable mixed situation of humans/persons. (Chapter 20: “Human, biology. Person, morality.) The leitmotif that accompanies it is very simple but very plaintive, verging toward the outside of common, western, musical practice. It is, however, highly receptive to variation. In the second track of Rendered, Animals Think, the goatboy motif appears three or four times, the final time expressing something like triumph. The main melody of Free Your Hand, on the other hand (sorry), is built upon the goatboy theme closer to its native melancholy.

Other leitmotifs audible in chapters 5 and 20 Of Real Things include “in a grain of sand” from Shielded Cable, “they stand their post” from Empire (The Tyger), and “give us our nourishment” from the title track, Rendered into Song.

Thank you for reading this document. It should come with the disclaimer that readers should beware authors’ commentaries on their own works–hardly objective testimony. I simply wish to give some background to a work that, I hope, needs no explanation.

Dk, 9-30-26