Features

If you thought the Berkeley Arts Festival was over, and that the busy schedule of musical events was burned out, flown by, finished, think again.  

There’s more to come, including a short but sweet concert Sunday afternoon. It will be a family affair, featuring compositions by Joanne D. Carey and her son, Brendan Carey.  

And one of Joanne Carey’s songs is based on a text written by her father-in-law, the painter Paul Carey, so three generations of the Carey family will be represented.  

The poem which provides the lyrics for the song “The Wetlands at Dusk” displays a painter’s eye for visual detail before giving way to meditative speculation and a tactile image in conclusion: When daylight softens gently into dusk/ and dusk is lost in shadowed night/ the stand of weeds that fence the trail/comes threateningly near. 

Joanne Carey’s rich harmonic palette paints a scene which glows in twilight serenity with light tints of clear insight. She does this with only a solo soprano and a piano. 

Her other two songs use an exotic synthesizer controller called a “radio baton.” This allows the performer in real time to alter the tempo and relative balance of the various parts of the score. Carey has created a complex soundscape of new sounds and emulations which adds up so that the whole is more than the sum of its parts. The Spanish texts are from poems by Pablo Neruda. 

Carey has set these poems to luscious scores to express the poem’s contrasting moods. 

This concert would be worthwhile simply for the chance to see Joanne Carey manipulate the radio baton, yet we also get to hear these beautiful compositions.  

And there is another reason to be at this event – a chance to hear the compositions of mother and son on the same program. 

Brendan Carey composed his two pieces under the heavy influence of J.S. Bach. They both display mastery of the forms of Baroque counterpoint and a delightful sense of melodic development.  

And why shouldn’t young Brendan Carey utilize pre-Classical style in this post-modern age? If poets can still write Shakespearean sonnets, why shouldn’t Carey write flashy contrapuntal pieces with fugues? Bach is a great river who continues to inspire concert-goers, singers, instrumentalists and even composers. 

Several of Paul Carey’s paintings of wetlands will be on display during the concert.