Students in the spring 2014 course “How to Write a Song,” offered by the Department of Music and the Lewis Center for the Arts’ Program in Creative Writing, will present original songs at a concert on April 28 at 4:30 p.m. at the Frist Campus Center Theater on the Princeton campus. The 17 students will perform selected new work completed over the past semester under the guidance of poet and songwriter Paul Muldoon and British songwriter and author John Wesley Harding. The performance is free and open to the public. The goal of Muldoon and Harding’s class was to encourage students to explore their own emotional cores through lyrics and songwriting. Each week, the students, all with varying levels of literary and musical backgrounds, split into different groupings of two to three participants and wrote lyrics and composed tunes on an assigned emotional topic, such as remorse, joy, despair, or desire. At each class, the students performed their pieces for their instructors and classmates, who then provided critiques. The course was first offered last spring as a one-time Princeton Atelier course, however due to its popularity and the exciting work that emerged from the inaugural year, the course was offered again this year through a collaboration of the Lewis Center and the Department of Music. “It’s been a delight spending the past semester with these students,” notes Muldoon. “They have demonstrated amazing creativity and dedication in bringing new work to class each week, and have offered incredibly insightful comments on one another’s work. At some level, Wes and I could step away and this group of artists could continue making exciting new work.”
