CUMBERLAND — The public is invited to “A Composer and A Poet,” an evening of words and music at the C. William Gilchrist Museum of the Arts on July 20 at 7 p.m.
The event is free but donations are welcome to support the nonprofit museum managed by the Cumberland Cultural Foundation.
Board member Penny Knobel-Besa arranged for the event, which will showcase original music and poems and allow guest artists to discuss their work.
The guest at the baby grand piano will be Italian composer Thomas Cadenazzi and reading her original works will be poet Ellen Coffey, who is awaiting publication of her third poetry journal.
Cadenazzi is a music composer from Como Lake, Italy. He moved to Miami in 2016 and in 2019 to Western Maryland, where he currently lives with his family of four. He composes orchestral and symphonic music as well as contemporary piano music.
The program will consist of several original works and three classical selections, including “Night Music of the Streets of Madrid” by Luigi Boccherini with poems interspersed between pieces by Coffey.
Cadenazzi has composed four studio albums, available on all digital stores, including iTunes, Spotify and Amazon. He has performed various live concerts throughout Italy.
“I met Penny Knobel-Besa in 2019 during an art showcase event of her art at the Allegany Arts Council in Cumberland,” Cadenazzi said. “After that, I started a close collaboration with her for the play she had written, “Almost Heaven.” This was a musical drama and I composed the score which was later performed at the Cumberland Theatre.”
Coffey lives in Cumberland with her cattle dog Gertie. She is a graduate of Northeastern Illinois University in Chicago and has had a diverse career journey, as counselor for adolescent girls in foster care, a regional manager for a national legal services company and a senior service manager for a publishing organization. She vowed that she would start writing for herself when she left corporate America.
“Poetry has always had a hold on my imagination, and I’ve been writing poems for over eight years now and I’ve made good on that promise to write,” Coffey said. I am also the current president of the Cumberland chapter of the Maryland Writers Association. My poems have been published in numerous literary arts magazines.”