PRIDE GUIDE 1996 GAY PEOPLE's Chronicle A-13

Steam and esteem: North Coast Men's Chorus sings out its pride

by Roger Durbin

The North Coast Men's Chorus will cap off Cleveland's Pride Day on June 15 with a preview of their performance for the Gay and Lesbian Chorus Association festival in Tampa in early July, as well as several “pride-ful” songs.

We will also give the world premiere of a second choral work written especially for the chorus.

Craig Carnahan, director of the Twin Cities Gay Men's Chorus, in Minneapolis-St. Paul, has set James Broughton's lush poem "The Gardener of Eden" to equally lush and romantic music.

Carnahan holds a bachelor of arts degree from Concordia College, and did graduate work in composition at the University of Minnesota, where his principal teachers were Dominick Argento and Paul Fetler.

Carnahan's compositions have been published by Boosey & Hawkes, Yelton Rhodes Music, and Walton Music. His recent commissions include "Domination of Black," which was recorded on Heartbeats: New Songs from Minnesota, for the AIDS Quilt Songbook; "WhitmanSongs;" and "Waltzes for Men." The Jerome Foundation has just awarded him a grant to underwrite the composition of The Last Word, a one-act opera on a libretto by James Broughton, the author of the piece set by Carnahan for our chorus.

Carnahan was the recipient of a McKnight Composition Fellowship. His music has been heard throughout the United States and Canada in performances by the Dale Warland Singers, the Los Angeles Master Chorale, to name some, and by gay men's choruses coastto-coast, ranging geographically from Toronto to Vancouver, from San Francisco to Boston, and from Albuquerque to Washington, D.C.

And now Carnahan has found the other coast, in the form of the North Coast Men's Chorus.

Poet, dramatist and filmmaker James Richard Broughton is quite a character. He was in contact with several important artistic figures of this century including Jean Cocteau, the French filmmaker, and the San Francisco literary set, most notably the Beat Generation poets led by Jack Kerouac and Lawrence Ferlinghetti.

The most repeated descriptive words to describe Broughton's art are variations on the term celebration. It is the mood he creates; it is his mood we share during Pride Day festivities.

Broughton made 14 films from 1946 to 1988. His collected films represent a remarkable body of work by a leading avant-garde American filmmaker-an undisputed master of the fusion of spoken poetry with moving images. His work The Pleasure Garden won a prize for poetic fantasy at the Cannes Film Festival of 1954.

One cinematic effort, The Bed (1968) has been described as "a lyrically erotic celebration of just about everything that could happen on a bed-with an all-nude cast, among them some of San Francisco's best-known artists."

"The Gardener of Eden," along with being a fine poem that Carnahan has set to music, was also the title of a work done for the screen. The film (1981) is “an intense poetic work that celebrates the sexual dance of all creation."

Broughton's poetry is, in large measure, intensely erotic, chock full of highly-charged visual images and musical rhythms. Perhaps one need but point to his "Nipples and Cocks," where the title images are used to gustatory singsong effect.

Carnahan's pulsing music for "The Gardener of Eden" matches the lushness, the rhythmic drive, and the creative energy found in the Broughton poem. It is a very fine work, and the Chorus invites you to share in the world premiere of this piece.

The North Coast Men's Chorus, Timothy

The North Coast Men's Chorus

Robson, music director, will present its Pride Day concert on Saturday, June 15, 1996, at 8:00 p.m., in Waetjen Auditorium in the Music and Communication Build-

DANIEL MILNER

ing at Cleveland State University. Free parking is available in the parking deck off Chester Ave. just north of the auditorium.

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