A Decades-Long Creative Dialogue
Composer Paul Salerni and poet Dana Gioia have unveiled Haunted and Other Works, a collection that fuses contemporary classical composition with verse. The release arrives as the latest installment in a professional alliance dating back to 1987. At its core, the project offers a 33-minute dance opera alongside three standalone songs, each anchored in the artists’ shared preoccupation with memory and the ethereal.
From The New Yorker to the Opera House
The partnership between Salerni, a professor emeritus, and Gioia, the former chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, began with a serendipitous discovery. Salerni’s wife found Gioia’s poem “Garden on the Campagna” in the pages of The New Yorker, sparking the idea for a musical setting. Since that initial spark, the duo has built a catalog defined by the interplay of art song, opera, and chamber music, including the 2010 one-act opera Tony Caruso’s Final Broadcast and the 2017 album Speaking of Love: Songs and Chamber Music.
The Spectral Roots of Haunted
The collection’s namesake, Haunted, stretches across 33 minutes of dance opera, centered on the lingering presence of a ghost. This spectral focus is not new ground for the pair; they previously probed the boundaries of the afterlife in Tony Caruso’s Final Broadcast. For Gioia, the fascination is rooted in a vivid childhood encounter following the funeral of his Aunt Felice. He recalls the figure appearing in his own bedroom: “She came up to the bed, she looked at me, she put her hand on me, and then she left.” Though Gioia identifies as a rationalist, he insists the encounter was real.
Where Mundane Reality Meets Myth
The collaboration frequently elevates personal anecdotes into broader artistic narratives. In the poem “Cruising with the Beach Boys,” Gioia draws directly from his family history, chronicling how his uncle once built a sandbox inside the living room of musician Brian Wilson. Gioia notes that his uncle was largely oblivious to Wilson’s fame, viewing him simply as a “nutty musician” with an unusual request for a floor renovation. By weaving these grounded, human moments into their work, Salerni and Gioia continue to define their signature style: a seamless bridge between the intimacy of poetry and the expansive reach of contemporary music.