Purpose
This project reimagines Edgar Allan Poe’s poetry through music, uncovering the emotions and meanings that lie between word and sound.
Edgar Allan Poe’s poetry addresses universal themes of grief, love, loss, isolation, and time—subjects that continue to resonate across centuries. Tones for Poe: A Musical Suite Inspired by the Poetry of Edgar Allan Poe reimagines five of his poems through original musical settings, using instrumentation, timbre, and ensemble design to interpret the emotional landscapes of his texts. The project offers audiences a new way to engage with Poe’s words, bridging literature and music through performance, analysis, and documentation.
The significance of this work lies in its contribution to both music and literary studies. Few comprehensive musical suites have been dedicated to Poe’s poetry, and Tones for Poe demonstrates how composition can function as both creative expression and scholarly inquiry. By presenting multiple ensemble configurations, varied approaches to text setting, and an emphasis on timbre as a carrier of emotion, the project highlights music’s capacity to open new interpretive perspectives on literary art.
Tones for Poe grew out of a lifelong connection to Poe’s writing and a desire to share it through music.
For me, these poems are not just texts but reflections of lived experience. Alone carries the weight of isolation, Evening Star embodies the entanglements of consuming love, A Dream Within a Dream wrestles with time, To One in Paradise grieves loss, and Spirits of the Dead contemplates the threshold between life and death. I have loved Poe’s words since childhood, drawn to their beauty and their shadows. Tones for Poe is at once a tribute to his genius and a personal journey, showing how music and poetry together can reveal the deepest parts of what it means to be human.
This website extends the project beyond performance, making it available as a resource for anyone who wishes to explore it. Here, you can follow the creative process, examine interpretive decisions, and encounter Poe’s texts alongside their musical realizations. My hope is that Tones for Poe inspires not only deeper appreciation for Poe’s genius, but also curiosity and love for the ways music and poetry can intersect. In this way, the project becomes more than a suite of compositions—it becomes an open invitation to engage, reflect, and create.
Music Cognition and Tones for Poe
Tones for Poe is grounded in ideas from music cognition, particularly how timbre, register, and articulation shape the emotional experience of sound. The project draws on principles first articulated by Leonard B. Meyer in Emotion and Meaning in Music (1956), which describes musical emotion as the tension between expectation and realization. This framework influences how the suite builds and releases energy—how listeners anticipate shifts in color, texture, and pacing. In Tones for Poe, timbre becomes the thread through which emotion unfolds, guiding the listener’s sense of movement and resolution.
Building on this foundation, Tones for Poe reflects Lindsey Reymore’s (2023) perceptual research on timbre semantics, which shows that listeners often associate higher, brighter sounds with brilliance or fragility, and lower, darker sounds with weight or warmth. These relationships shaped how I approached instrumentation across the suite: bright timbres often signal illumination or transcendence, while darker colors anchor moments of reflection or solitude. Zachary Wallmark’s (2019) analysis of orchestration language complements this perspective, revealing how composers historically describe timbre through embodied metaphors—linking sound to touch, color, and emotion. Tones for Poe engages this idea by using timbral contrast and blend to mirror the sensory and emotional dualities found throughout Poe’s writing.
Research on timbre and harmonic “goodness-of-fit” also influenced how the suite balances unity and tension. Studies show that when tone colors align spectrally, listeners perceive coherence, while divergence creates expressive strain. These insights guided how I shaped transitions between instruments and textures, allowing moments of connection and dissonance to mirror the psychological instability within Poe’s poetry. Similarly, Bachorik, Loui, and colleagues’ (2009) study Emotion in Motion—which examined the time-course of emotional perception—helped shape the pacing of the music. Their finding that listeners need several seconds to integrate and interpret emotion encouraged me to let each section breathe, allowing emotional arcs to evolve naturally alongside the imagery and pacing of Poe’s verse, inviting listeners to inhabit those gradual shifts of feeling.
Finally, Carr, Olsen, and Thompson (2023) demonstrated that articulation—particularly contrasts between legato and staccato—can meaningfully alter perceived emotion, influencing how listeners experience tenderness, energy, or tension. Tones for Poe expands on this concept through the broader expressive palette of jazz articulation: subtle scoops, accents, and varying degrees of sustain shape how emotion is phrased and felt. These gestures, drawn from both classical and jazz traditions, allow articulation to become another layer of expression—one that breathes with the rhythm of Poe’s language.
“I have great faith in fools - self-confidence my friends will call it.”