Toby Lurie & Friends

The Lost Coast Word Music Ensemble, featuring:

• Toby Lurie
• Toni Orans
• Nancy and Brian Lewis

Toby Lurie has created a truly unique form of spoken word music, having composed 13 spoken-language symphonies, some of which are created on canvas as large as 120 sq. ft.

Mr Lurie’s poetry is profoundly exciting to me as a linguist and fellow human being. What he does with the non-segmental features of of pitch, stress and juncture has not ever, I think, been done before.”

He creates an extraordinary psych-drama,, catalyzing his audience into a mass participation in which each individual finds himself experiencing his own unique emotions.”

Toby Lurie’s poetry is actually something new. Ity is action poetry and involves the audience and the reader and makes them do things with their voices and their minds they had not expected to do.”

My principal focus as a poet, now in my 90s, is to cross that fine border which separates spoken language from music so that one becomes the other and the other becomes the one.”

I’ll be working with my group, The Lost Coast Word-Music Ensemble and performing some of my paintings, as well as inviting my audience to participate in some conducted improvisational improvisations.”