"My Business is to Sing" will be shown at the Amherst Cinema Arts Center.
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Emily Dickinson“My Business is to Sing,” the third documentary in the series “Angles of a Landscape” about the great Amherst poet Emily Dickinson will have its premiere on Thursday at the Amherst Cinema Arts Center at 7:30 p.m.
The screening will be followed by a reception at the Amherst History Museum at 67 Amity St., across the street from the cinema.
Produced under the auspices of the Emily Dickinson Museum, “My Business is to Sing” explores how the music of Dickinson’s time gave life to her poetic voice. From early childhood, the poet played “moosic,” took piano and singing lessons, and later improvised her own “weird and beautiful melodies” to entertain her family and friends. Using the meter and rhyme of hymns and ballads for her own artistic purposes, Dickinson expressed complex emotions, unconventional ideas, and remarkable images in her revolutionary “songs.”
The 40-minute film was written and narrated by the poet Susan Snively. With Ernest Urvater, Snively was also its co-producer. “My Business is to Sing” presents to the audience music the poet heard or sang, including hymns, popular songs, brass bands, ballet, concert pieces, and opera, and is performed by Valley musicians and others.
A song by the well-known contemporary composer Alice Parker, set to a Dickinson poem, gives expression to Dickinson’s experience of joy mixed with anguish. The film demonstrates how the poet, a lover of birds, wove their “dizzy music” into her words, along with the familiar noises of cats, dogs, crickets, bees, frogs, and flies.
The poet’s words record the loves and losses of a life more dramatic than her readers often suppose. In the film, the “Titanic Operas” of the poet’s work are illuminated by nineteenth-century art by painters William Blake, Thomas Cole, Martin Johnson Heade, George Inness, and Orra White Hitchcock, as well as images from dance, the concert stage, illustrated newspapers, the natural world, and Dickinson’s home.
“My Business is to Sing” is based on Carolyn Cooley’s 2003 book, The Music of Emily Dickinson’s Poems and Letters, and is the third in a series, “Angles of a Landscape: Perspectives on Emily Dickinson,” which explores little-known aspects of Dickinson’s life and work.
Tickets for the general public are $5 and are available at the Amherst Cinema box office or online www.amherstcinema.org
Tickets for Members of the Emily Dickinson Museum and Members of the Amherst Cinema and Pleasant Street Theater are $4 and are available at the Amherst Cinema box office. Cinema Members may also obtain tickets for $4 online, www.amherstcinema.org
