© 2024 WNIJ and WNIU
Northern Public Radio
801 N 1st St.
DeKalb, IL 60115
815-753-9000
Northern Public Radio
Play Live Radio
Next Up:
0:00
0:00
0:00 0:00
Available On Air Stations

Valentine's Concert An Evening Of Poetry And Music About Love

Christine Swanberg, Trinadora

This weekend, poet Christine Swanberg and Trinadora, musicians Ron Holm and Jannie Nelson, give a Valentine’s Day concert at Rockford’s JustGoods Fair Trade Marketplace.  Swanberg explains the theme of the concert.

“We call it ‘Scenes of Love: Through it All’ – through it all is actually a line from one of Trinadora’s songs – and instead of just looking at all the happy things of love, we’re looking at many facets of what it means to fall in love, what it means to try to stay in love, and even the idea of long-term love, and what that’s about, so it’s very mature in that way.”

There are plenty of love songs out there.  Ron Holm says they did a couple of things to bring the concert into focus.

“We tried very hard to limit the songs to original compositions and to literally look at Christine’s poetry books, and talk about different poems she had written, and then think out loud about different songs that expressed a similar or complementary sentiment"

Holm thinks the combination works well and thinks the material will connect well with an audience

“People like to be happy and hear happy songs, and we’ve got plenty of them," he said.  "But I think they also like to resonate with other experiences, and poetry and music have a way of emoting and making things a little more intensely real sometimes.  And one of the things that people, I think, if the concert works well, leave with is, yeah, I’ve felt some of that, I’ve been there, it’s not just me.”

Poet Christine Swanberg and Trinadora (Ron Holm and Jannie Nelson) present original poetry and music of love at 7 p.m. Saturday, Feb.14, in the Just Goods Listening Room.

Guy Stephens produces news stories for the station, and coordinates our online events calendar, PSAs and Arts Calendar announcements. In each of these ways, Guy helps keep our listening community informed about what's going on, whether on a national or local level. Guy's degrees are in music, and he spent a number of years as a classical host on WNIU. In fact, after nearly 20 years with Northern Public Radio, the best description of his job may be "other duties as required."