Collegiate Times

Twenty years ago composer Gregory Hutter and Virginia Tech faculty member Tracy Cowden were practicing in the same piano studio as undergraduates. They lost touch and after more than 10 years of no contact, they found each other through a Web site: Facebook.

“It’s very exciting for me to work with somebody I was a classmate with many, many years ago,” Hutter said. “It was a very auspicious reunion — Facebook of all things.”

After being reunited, the pair began collaborating again and their work can be seen in a Saturday performance, “Poe-Ism.” Cowden will play “Spirits of the Dead,” a piece Hutter composed and based off of the works of famed American writer Edgar Allan Poe.

Cowden requested Hutter to write a piece for her with Poe as the theme early this year. He started the piece on June 8 and completed it a month later.

To celebrate the bicentennial of Poe, the pianist Cowden is joined by Renaissance Music Academy faculty members and Patty Raun, director of the School of Performing Arts and Cinema. Raun will read the poems “Ulalume” and “The Sleeper” as part of the performance.

“It’s an exciting mix around an interesting central idea,” Raun said.

She listened to the music in rehearsal and said she believes that it has a very diverse style.

 “I didn’t choose poems that were the most famous ones,” Hutter said. “I basically chose some pieces that I thought would, first and foremost, lend themselves well to musical settings.”

Hutter chose five poems that he said felt captured Poe’s melancholy tone: “Song,” “Hymn,” “Spirit of the Dead,” “The Lake: To —” and “To the River.”

“The text weaves one cohesive mood in terms of the melancholy idea,” Hutter said. “As far as musical settings, I tried to reflect that as much as possible, with a variety of different musical techniques.”

While Poe’s pieces share a mood, each has a unique construction.

“These poems were very different as far as the structure,” Hutter said. “In terms of the rhyme and meter, they’re almost like pop tunes. There’s certain symmetry to them where you have a rhyme almost every other line of text.”

Hutter said this could also be problematic, causing songs to be too “square” or like pop music.

“You can try to find ways to escape that symmetry or you can kind of go with it,” Hutter said. “In the end, I kind of tried to go with it and tried to find the natural meter. I didn’t try to fight it, I let it happen.”

Hutter found it easy to set the poetry to music since the Poe’s work already had a rhythmic quality.

“The music wrote itself in many perspectives,” he said.

Pianist and performer Cowden said the goal of Saturday’s University Chamber Music performance is to expose the community to classical music. 

“The idea is that everybody has the capacity to understand classical music — this is one way to do it,” Cowden said. “We try to provide multiple points of interest for audience so that people have something familiar.”