There is an Orphic moment when awareness overflows: lyrical, poetic, musical, creative, self-surpassing in imaginative embrace of both the real and the possible. There is an Orphic locus where art and spirituality are the same, where divinity and corporeality are synonymous, where song is the universal impulse.
In 2013 C. A. Corbell was evolving from songwriter, bandleader, and sometimes poet, to producer of chamber music concerts while composing for various instruments and voice. Cult of Orpheus was the name he took for the effort which debuted his first composed songs — settings of texts from The Dhammapadha, from Catullus and Baudelaire and Edna St. Vincent Millay among others. The name was chosen not so much for the sake of branding as for a mystic-poetic covenant, to ensure the focus would remain on what he sensed as that rare Orphic moment/locus which makes room and time for lyrical, poetic song. That first concert, at a small pub in north Portland, fittingly ended with the composer’s setting of a poem from Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus.
Subsequently the creative cult developed and produced the premiere and repeated production of Corbell’s first opera, Viva’s Holiday. At the five-year mark in 2018, Cult of Orpheus produced recordings both of the opera and of The Emerald Tablet, a hermetic cantata for vocal quartet and string quartet, along with other vocal works. The final pre-pandemic concert given by the group in 2019 featured new musical settings of works by local poets, performed as part of Portland Book week.
In 2024 Cult of Orpheus musical activity resumed, presenting new composed songs as part of the Washougal Songcraft Festival (which Corbell had meanwhile co-founded with wife Stephanie), and continuing in 2025 with a participatory session in that organization’s education program.
In 2025 a new chapter has begun with the launch of Cult of Orpheus Press and the publication of Corbell’s first full-length book of poems, ATHENALOGIA, as well as a catalog of musical scores.
Enjoy the growing body of work, and stay tuned to see how this story continues!