I found out that the music Strayhorn wrote for the 1953 production of Lorca's play in the Artists' Theatre has been recorded by the Dutch Jazz Orrchestra. There are four pieces of music, two quite lovely songs (Love, Love and The Flowers Die of Love) and two instrumentals (Sprite Music and Wounded Love). There is more information in Walter van de Leur's Something to Live For: The Music of Billy Strayhorn, a quite wonderful book I'm reading now. Wonderful in part because the author looked at thousands of Strayhorn scores.

I'm keeping my new year's resolution of studying the music of Ellington and Strayhorn, and in the process becoming more of a Strayhornian, which we might define as someone who views Strayhorn as much more than a "Duke Jr.," who views his contributions as those of an independent force, who does indeed care what Strayhorn wrote and what Duke wrote and is interested in the differences between the two composers--though with zero interest in diminishing Duke in any way. I reject the Collier view of Ellington's musical deficiencies.

I'm mulling over an article about the Artists' Theatre production of Lorca's play. I'm not sure there's enough there yet to justify more than a brief note in the encyclopedia of Lorca trivia. The Artists' Theatre itself is quite fascinating. I have a book that contains four plays produced there, by O'Hara, Ashbery, Merrill, and Abel. Merrill's play "The Bait" is quite superb, as is Lionel Abel's "Absalom." I already knew the plays by O'Hara and Ashbery.

Alfred Leslie's sets for Lorca's Don Perlimplín were destroyed in a fire in the 1970s.

I never knew that Billy Strayhorn had written music for a production of Lorca's Don Perlimplín for The Artist's Theater! Maybe I'll have to write another book about Lorca.

Alfred A. Knopf himself, personally, rejected Langston Hughes' translation of Romancero gitano (Gypsy Ballads) in the late 1940s. Literary history would have been different if this book was accepted. It finally appeared only as a chapbook by the Beloit Poetry review in the early 1950s. Imagine what impact it would have made as a trade book by a major NY publisher?

The correct way to list Lorca in an index is

García Lorca, Federico

NOT

Lorca, Federico García

or WORSE YET

Lorca, García



Thank you,

Signed,

Guy who looks up "García Lorca" and "Lorca" in the index of every imaginable book for current research project.

Lorca Trivia

Robert Motherwell's series of painting "Elegy to the Spanish Republic" started out as an image to which he gave the title "At five in the Afternoon," after Lorca.

Lorca Trivia

Diane Wakoski wrote a poem which recounts a dream: Lorca rides by on a horse and entrusts her with the safekeeping of every gold objects in the world.

Lorca Trivia

Roy Campbell once punched Stephen Spender at a poetry reading. Both were translators of Lorca.

Lorca Trivia

Kenneth Koch's son-in-law Mark Statman has translated Poet in New York. Coming soon to a fine bookstore near you.

Lorca trivia of the day

Allen Ginsberg wrote the line

"Franco murdered Lorca the fairy son of Whitman"

Lorca trivia of the day

Singer-songwriter-poet Leonard Cohen named his daughter "Lorca."