Central Texas Composers and Typewriter Rodeo present:
Selections from “Free: A Collaborative Exploration”
Performers:
Ben Tibbetts, piano | Kevin Vorabout, saxophone
Jordan Walsh, percussion
Carol Brown, soprano | Kevin Arratia-Diaz, tenor
Ayden Crockett, bass-baritone
1. FREE POEMS
Music by Brittney Smith | Text by Sean Petrie
FREE POEMS is a celebration of poetry as a living, breathing thing; not locked in libraries or lecture halls, but wild and free, belonging to anyone who has ever strung a feeling into words.
Set for baritone, tenor, piano, saxophone, and drums, the piece pulses with a Latin-tinged energy that refuses to sit still. The rhythm drives forward in a swift cut time, pushing the voices into their upper registers; demanding not just height, but brightness, urgency, and joy. It is music that leans into the sun.
At its heart, FREE POEMS carries a single, luminous conviction: poetry is for everyone. Not just for the schooled or the initiated. Sean Petrie’s text gives voice to that idea with wit and warmth, and the chorus distills it to its most elemental form. “Words and words and words and words,” it declares, before spilling into the building blocks of verse: “verses, quatrains, sonnets, haikus” as if to say: here is the whole toolkit, and it belongs to you.
The melody is unabashedly singable. It will arrive in your head uninvited and stay longer than expected. This is entirely intentional.
What emerges is something joyful, a little swinging, and irresistibly alive; a reminder that the poem you carry in your pocket, your memory, or your mouth is already enough.
2. twenty-free
Music by Carol Brown | Text by Shanna Gerlach
Summer camp. Freedom. Friendships and first crushes molded with intensity and haste that leave us lingering in the memories made in those short windows of escape, growth, and wild adventures away from home. twenty-free takes us on a nostalgia-filled journey about coming-of-age over these summers, of joy and camaraderie, infused with the pain of grieving our fading youth and what we carry with us after. Especially when our wanderlust, curiosity, and innocence are exploited.
Poet Shanna Gerlach lets the memories breathe before they land in twenty-free. This fusion-style performance piece strives to capture storytelling with structure that emulates recitative and aria form, bracketed by a nod to classic jazz noir. The relaxed backbeat and walking base line tempt us to settle in to the story, told through spoken word and song. The saxophone represents the lingering presence of the antagonist, who seduces the listener before revealing their true colors through gritty tension and unease.
twenty-free is about what we carry from the summers that shaped us, and asks what it takes to let it go.
3. "Freedom: An Elegy"
Music by Ben Tibbetts | Text by David Fruchter
Consider, as if for the first time: as you’re given more options in life, more abilities, more money, more connections, at what point does that become a burden? When does it stop being exciting and start feeling oppressive? In other words, can you be too free?
David’s simple, melancholy poem suggests possibility without direction, a sense that choices no longer seem meaningful. Even as he echoes “Me and Bobby McGee”—“freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose”—the full text doesn’t come across as empowering. It’s about paralysis and fatigue. Having too many choices makes it hard to choose anything.
He writes that freedom gives him “the blues,” so the music I wrote draws from that tradition. It swings, it sings, and it leans back with weariness. Even when it’s joyful, there’s a cynical edge. If it were a character, it might be smoking a cigarette, giving you a tired, skeptical look, like Bogart’s Rick Blaine at the end of a long night: “Do what you want, but so what? Freedom gives me the blues.”