UNIVERSITY NEWS LAST UPDATED : 23 OCTOBER
Ahead of Friday’s collaboration between Visiting Professor of Music at Royal Birmingham Conservatoire, Ustad Johar Ali, and Birmingham City University’s Professor of Poetry, Gregory Leadbetter, we go behind-the-scenes with Greg to uncover more about what is set to be a beguiling evening of music and poetry.
“Poetry and music are sister arts,” Greg begins. With his past work duetting the mediums—a song-cycle featuring poems from his collection The Fetch by composer and pianist Eric McElroy, and a recording with tenor James Gilchrist—Greg is no stranger to multidisciplinary art forms.
“The relationship between them is an abiding personal interest and theme in my work,” he continues. “While poetry involves words, poetic composition both involves and reaches beyond their dictionary meanings. Similarly, music, even when it uses words, blends those words and their meanings within an aural experience with its own evocative power.”
In the first performance of a new collaboration between world-renowned Indian musician Ustad Johar Ali, Visiting Professor of Music at RBC, and Greg as poet and Professor of Poetry at BCU, the evening will see Johar improvise music in a variety of forms as Greg recites poetry by Rumi, Ghalib, and Shakespeare, together with two of his own poems.
“It is an intercultural exchange of a kind that both Johar and I wish to encourage and develop, spanning centuries of poetic and musical tradition, highlighting existing connections across those traditions and creating new ones,” Greg adds.
Johar is set to spend six months with RBC and BCU in his role as Chair of the Indian Council of Cultural Relations (ICCR). He has been working with RBC students and musicians young and old from Birmingham's communities, building on the pioneering work of last year’s ICCR Chair Radhika Balakrishnan.
“Walter Pater famously said that all art aspires to the condition of music, but it might also be said that music aspires to the condition of language,” Greg continues. “Both music and poetry involve their audiences in the altered states that they create in these kindred ways.”
What does this exchange spell for the audience? “I hope that the audience will be delighted and intrigued by what they encounter, and encourage fresh perspectives on poetry and music – especially in thinking about intercultural exchange, cultural transmission, and the new connections that we can forge as artists, audiences, and societies.”
Join Greg and Johar for an evening of music and multilingual poetry on Fri 25 Oct at Royal Birmingham Conservatoire. Book Now.