Morningsong Studios: Todd's art and music

We humans love to make stuff, don't we? I sure do: pottery, musical instruments, songs, poetry, photographs... I'm happiest when I have at least one creative project underway. I hope you enjoy checking out some of the stuff I've made. If you get a bit of inspiration from this, my work has been worthwhile.

For my current work in functional and sculptural pottery (including ceramic musical instruments), my primary creative focus these days, please follow this link.

You can also find me and my new work on instagram at instagram.com/toddroseart, and on my facebook page, "Luthipoetic Musicography: Artworks in Convergent Media by Todd Rose".

A couple of ukuleles:

 Two recordings made with these ukes:

A guitar that exemplifies some of the ideas in guitar design that I’ve explored:

A song, played on a guitar similar to this one:

A poem :

On the Ground

At the end of a long day’s work, driving home
below a sky stained pink and purple by the retiring sun,
I passed under a vast flock of crows
and leaned into the wheel to look up, wide-eyed, through the windshield

All these years I’ve lived among crows, never knowing
they gather in such numbers

Their flight was not the dutiful V of migrating Canada geese,
nor the tight choreography of a starling murmuration,
but a great, lazy river reaching from horizon to horizon,
unhurried, yet flowing purposefully, west to east

Tens of thousands of black wings in ripples and waves of free-form rhythm,
silent song to the darkening heavens

And to me, on the ground below,
steering my car down Danby Road
to get home for supper
 

Two large stoneware sculptural vessels:

A large clay ocarina. Measuring 5 1/2” long, about the size of my cupped hand, it has a deep, haunting sound:

A one-of-a-kind instrument I call a zoukulele (with reference to the Irish bouzouki and the ukulele):

A flute inspired by traditional Indigenous American flute designs; made of PVC pipe, ebony, cherry, and leather; painted, with floral vine design done by my daughter in acrylic paint:

Some clay drums:

A couple short recordings demonstrating the sound of one of these drums:

Some recordings from a songwriting-with-kids project, late 1990s:

Some photographs:

A poem:

For My Brother On What Would Have Been His 58th Birthday
September 29, 2019

Great flocks of geese are flying south today

Low clouds also drift southward
Filling most of the sky with their gray-bottomed whiteness

My copper-furred companion and I tread barefoot
On the wet grass of the hillside below

The geese fly higher than the clouds
And the faraway sound of their spirited honk-chatter moves faster, too
Toward the southern horizon

But they are like ghosts to our eyes
Until a loosely-strung V appears for a moment
Sailing across a narrow blue window

More stuff:

A song from the mid-1980s:

A rough demo of a new song, played on the white and black (holly and ebony) ukulele pictured near the top of this page:

Thanks for your interest! I'll be adding more stuff to this page from time to time (more musical instruments, pottery, new songs...), so please come back. And, if you're on facebook, please keep an eye on my facebook page here.