Search - Devi Mathieu, W. A. Mathieu, Shira Kammen :: Café Hafiz

I think of the music of songs as a delivery system for the ideas and metaphors in words. The music lets the words vibrate in the resonant caverns of the heart where they become realized as pathos and laughter. My musical style uses a wide palette of modulating modal flux ? which means that an expanded major-minor-ness moves throughout a wide range of territory. The music can go anywhere the words take them and arrive to the listener newly sensuous and seductive. Songs that Belong in Cafés and Cabarets
Cabaret art is adult in that it is ironic, not romantic. It doesn't buy the dream, it swallows the bitter pill. It illuminates contradictions at the core of humanity, and reaffirms how life at its most serious is so often comic as well. If you sit back comfortably enough in the cabaret of your mind, everything has an ironic edge, life is funny. That's what makes cabaret songs so delicious. Café Hafiz ? Eight wild and sweet poems from Hafiz (versions by Daniel Ladinsky
Over and over I've fallen in love with Robert Bly's versions of Kabir, and with Coleman Barks' versions of Rumi. In the same way, Café Hafiz came about through sheer love of Daniel Ladinsky's lyrical and insightful versions of Hafiz. Hafiz glides and scurries all over the place trying to get his audience to feel the deep presence of the divine in every crevice and on every surface. Yet rarely is he not funny, and most often the irony stings. I like the sting ? it gives me a rather specific job as a composer: to make the sting feel so good that the listener wants it to go deeper. About loneliness, for instance, Hafiz says, Let it cut more deep, let it ferment and season you. California Flora
California Flora came about as an act of courtship. In 1986, Devi introduced me to the secret language of botany. Although I didn't much understand it, in my ignorance the intimate descriptions of the plants, including, of course the detailed anatomy of their sex lives, sounded to me like operatic melodramas of mating and survival. Although this was an unashamed anthropomorphic act on my part, the irony is that we do this anyway, even with our closest of friends, with those whom we presume to understand the most. So I wrote these songs for my sweetheart as arias of the deeply moving lives of the plants she loved, and in 1987 we got married. Five Cabaret Songs ? poems by Arnold Weinstein
In 1961, Chicago's Second City Theater was flourishing, due in large part to the visionary direction of Paul Sills. One day, a New York friend of Paul's, Arnold Weinstein, showed up at a rehearsal and handed me five cameo poems with permission to use them any way I wanted. I set them to music and we tried them out, but they proved too difficult for the soprano ingénue. For fifty years they lay fallow in my composition book Number 7. In 2011, I came across them again, was enchanted by the verses and, in composition book Number 103, recomposed them. The late Arnold Weinstein is remembered as "the poet of Broadway"; these brief verses gracefully demonstrate the soul of his wit. Sleep Pictures ? poems by Devi Mathieu
These images were selected and shaped into verse from years of dream journals. The central irony of our waking state ? that life is dream-like ? arises reciprocally in the illusive reality of dreams. What we so preciously hold onto as real is never quite free from that irony. And so let it come to pass, dear patrons of Café Hafiz, that with these songs we shall all sleep well tonight, with only slightly troubled dreams. Devi Mathieu sings early and contemporary music in the US and Europe. She coaches singers of early music, and leads gatherings devoted to singing the music of Hildegard von Bingen as contemplative practice.