Robert Browning, Baldessarre Galuppi, and Kris Delmhorst

Kris Delmhorst's most recent album, Strange Conversation, opens with a catchy track called Galuppi Baldassare, in which Delmhorst sets Robert Browning's "A Toccata of Galuppi's" to music and add conversational lines of her own. You can download the track (and a few others from the same album) at Womenfolk.net. (Baldassarre Galuppi was a Venetian composer of mainly underwhelming tinkly parlor music.) This interrelationship of music, poetry, and place fascinates me: what Browning's speaker gets from Galuppi's toccata seems worlds different from what Delmhost gets from Browning's poem.