Singing in Strange Lands

The eminent Old Testament scholar and theologian, Walter Brueggemann, writes tellingly about the different modes of Psalms. He divides them into three primary categories. While the contemporary Christian church tends to focus on the pastoral Psalms of thanksgiving and praise, he directs attention to the more idiosyncratically Jewish Psalms of "disorientation" and "new orientation." The Psalms of lamentation and the "penitential Psalms" fall into the former category in articulating the Psalmist's (and the people's) sufferings and tribulations, often from a locus of captivity and/or exile--literal and spiritual.

Psalm 13 opens with a characteristic expression of abandonment & isolation:

"How long, O Lord? Will you forget me forever?"

Psalm 137, one of the most famous of these Psalms, begins in exile:

"By the waters of Babylon, there we sat down and wept, when we remembered Zion. On the willows there we hung up our lyres."

The cessation and absence of song are traits of these exilic lamentations. Such metaphors have been present in the spiritual and aesthetic lives of Psalmists from the Babylonian exile to the Shoah. They have inspired composers from the Renaissance to today, from Palestrina to Arvo Pärt. These poems are complex, invite multiple readings, and resist the pat triumphalism that characterizes much contemporary usage of the Psalms.

Indeed, Theodor Adorno's dictum that "after Auschwitz there can be no poetry" still resonates, as sirens blared in Israel yesterday to mark Holocaust Remembrance Day. That harrowing annual ritual commemorating the Shoah reminds us that even the starkest Psalmist metaphors can be rendered inadequate.

I have been reacquainting myself with the life and music of Hugo Distler, the early 20th century Lutheran composer and conductor who took his own life in 1942 (he was 34). "Until now I believed that God was with me, but now I believe that he has forsaken me." Echoing Psalm 22 ("My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?") Distler's words upon receiving the consription orders from the Nazis drove him to self-inflicted martyrdom. Even more tragically, friends were working to exempt the exceptionally gifted musician from service in the SS, but that news did not reach him in time.

Another artist who has been much on my consciousness lately (see previous posts) is the "mad" poet John Clare. Institionalized for the last 30-some years of his life, Clare echoed the Zionist laments of the exilic Psalms in his letters:

"I am in the ninth year of Captivity among the Babylonians and any news from Home is a Godsend or blessing."

In drawing our attention to the Psalms of disorientation, Brueggemann warns his readers of the uncomfortable landscape they inhabit, with violent language of bitter comlaint and unsated vengeance. While the opening of Psalm 137 vividly evokes captivity, exile, and the unsettling quiet of silenced songs, the end of the Psalm is disturbingly violent:

"O daughter of Babyon, doomed to be destroyed, blessed shall he be who repays you with what you have done to us!
Blessed shall he be who takes your little ones and dashes them against the rock!"

I do not presume to be enough of a theologian or literary critic to unpack the layers of significance in such language. I appreciate Brueggemann's identifying of the Psalmists' process (and progression) from despair to vengeance to eventual faithfulness. He describes such cries for vengeance as "venting" and cites their necessity in such a complex relationship.

Clare could be equally violent when describing his captivity and the sufferings (both real and imagined) he endured in the asyla:

"...When people make such mistakes as to call me God's bastard and whores pay me by shutting me up from God's people out of the way of common sense and then take my head off because they can't find me--it out Herods Herod"

Distler, as noted above, felt forsaken, and in another letter describes the political realities of the Nazi regime as a time

"in which God has apparently relinquished power to the Evil One."

With telling self-awareness, he analyzes his own state of mind:

"I suffer increasingly from a chronic despondency that borders on depression and is certainly the result of the irritating war of nerves. There are no words to describe how horrible the present and the near future look to us."

Distler's music expresses the anxiety & fear--the angst--of his time, and his impressive output of sacred music reflects such struggles. Much of his music is based on Lutheran chorales. Distler's motets are masterpieces of the 20th century as Bach's are to the Baroque. And like Bach, Distler does not shrink from the theological and human complexities of sacred poems like Isaiah's "Surely he has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows." (Fürwahr, er trug unsere Krankheit, op. 12, no. 9 is one of Distler's crowning achivements in his unfinished magnum opus of Sacred Choral Music). While Bach often hid the chorale tunes in the middle of dense textures of elaborate counterpoint, Distler's scores are more disjointed. Wide leaps and extended melismas characterize his melodies, haltering rhythms trip over one another as they accelerate, and snippets of recognizable tunes briefly appear, like a swimmer lifting his head above the water to gasp for air. These motets sound like no others, and deserve a wider berth in our appreciation of the tradition. And lest the reader think they are all darkness and despair, Distler struggles to emerge from the abyss and--if not attain--at least glimpse the light.

"May the great light in the midst of the great darkness that dominates the world grow and finally triumph...Most important: that we soon have peace. Let us pray above all for that."

Unlike Psalm 137, most of these Psalms of lamentation contain a pivot point where the disorientation, bitterness &/or vengeance yields to doxology. Distler's quote echoes the pithy example of Psalm 13, the first verse of which opened this essay. The last half of the 6 verse Psalm continues:

" Consider and answer me, O Lord my God;
light up my eyes, lest I sleep the sleep of death,
lest my enemy say "I have prevailed over him,"
lest my foes rejoice because I am shaken."

Then, the seemingly out-of-the-blue (like an unprepared harmonic progression) hinge from demanding complaint to praise:

"But I have trusted in your steadfast love;
my heart shall rejoice in your salvation.
I will sing to the Lord,
because he has dealt bountifully with me."

Through the complex and untidy process of confrontation & complaint, with spiritual & emotional honesty, the Psalmist actively cultivates relationship with God, with remarkable self-awareness of his rights & his place. That is, at least, one reading of the above. In that light, I read Distler's and Clare's writings with a look to the whole, mourn the tragedies of their respective ends and celebrate the affirming power of their work with renewed zest and will.

The Psalmist in 137 asks "How shall we sing the Lord's song in a foreign land?" Clare lamented a similar fate with more disturbing imagery when asked about how his poetry was progressing in the Northampton General Lunatic Asylum, his "home" from 1841 until his death in 1864:

"Why, they have cut off my head and picked out all the letters in the alphabet--all the vowels and all the consonants and brought them out through my ears--and then they want me to write poetry! I can't do it."

And just as the Psalmist uses metaphor to work through the process of negativity via the demands for revenge, Clare managed to retrieve a few vowels and consonants, and like his older colleague, Christopher Smart (another "mad" poet and Britten muse, to be discussed later!) wrote remarkably visionary poetry while institutionalized.

Distler's tombstone contains an epitaph from John 16:33:

"In the world you are afraid, but be of good courage,
for I have overcome the world."

Clare's final poem 'Birds Nests,' contains a similar message of comfort from the sanctuary of Nature:

'Tis Spring warm glows the South
Chaffinchs carry the moss in his mouth
To the filbert hedges all day long
And charms the poet with his beautiful song

"Crazy crackd braind fellow"

Franz Wright begins his wry poem, "Publication Date" with this observation:

One of the few pleasures of writing
is the thought of one's books in the hands of a kindhearted
intelligent person somewhere. I can't remember what the others
are right now.

The British "peasant poet" John Clare (1793-1864; see end of previous post re: Britten Project) may or may not posthumously agree with Wright. But the two share a sensibility for the artist's tenuous foothold in life, his shifting relationship with the cosmos, and a conscience plagued by pendulum swings that range from mountain-top exhilaration to valley-of-death despair (we use the pallid diagnosis "bipolar disorder" today. "Manic-depressive" is a better descriptor of these competing poles of consciousness).

As he worked on his first book of poetry, Clare wrote in his autobiography, with portentous self-awareness:

I felt awkwardly situated and knew not which way to proceed.
I had a variety of minds about me and all of them unsettled.

Often compared to Robert Burns, both for cultivating a style of writing beholden to folk-song, & vernacular speech (as opposed to a learned "academic" style) and for falling victim to vice, Clare's first publisher wrote:

It is to be greatly feared that the man will be afflicted with insanity 

if his talent continues to be forced as it has been...

he has no other mode of easing the fever that oppresses him
after a tremendous fit of rhyming except by getting tipsy...

Then he is melancholy and completely hypochondriac.

Wright's poem continues with a similar temperamental sea-change:

I just noticed that it is my own private
National I Hate Myself and Want to Die Day
(which means the next day I will love my life
and want to live forever).

After achieving a burst of fame & notoriety as the rustic, peasant poet & uncultured genius, Clare presciently saw the writing on the wall (he had little formal education and worked as an agricultural labourer to support his parents and siblings):

I am sought after very much agen [sic] now...

some rather entertaining people and some d----d knowing fools--
but let me wait another year or two and the peep show will be over--

and my vanity if I have any will end
in its proper mortification to know that obscurity is happiness 

and that John Clare the thresher in the onset
and neglected rhymer in the end 

are the only two comfortable periods of his life.

Though largely self-taught as a writer and reader, Clare was an astute observer and critic, and the inimitably colorful language of his poetry and prose became a trademark (and puts him near the level of his Romantic contemporaries like Coleridge, Byron & Keats). Here is one such observation, replete with his characteristically idiosyncratic spelling & grammar:

Wordsworth defies all art and in all the lunatic Enthuseism of nature
he negligently sets down his thoughts from the tongue of his inspirer.

Clare also demonstrated his grasp of relations where business 

is concerned in self-effacing imagery to his publisher, 

while working on his second collection:

"I have been trying songs and want your judgment only either to

stop me or set me off again at full gallop which your disaproval

or applause has as much power to effect as if spoken by a majician--

the rod of criticism in your hand has as much power over your

poor sinful rhymer as the rod of Aaron in the land of Egypt.

Biblical references pepper Clare's writing and his shifting, 

doubt-ridden faith anticipates such eminent writers as Hardy. 

Both poets articulated their doubts about institutionalized religion 

while outlining creeds extolling the enduring presence of Nature.

Wright's poem comes from his latest book, "God's Silence" a masterful sequence of poems charting the journey of life and faith and the artist's struggle to find & create meaning in the midst of the ever-shifting seasons.  "Publication Date" continues:

The forecast calls

for a cold night in Boston all morning

and all afternoon. They say

tomorrow will be just like today,

only different. I'm in the cemetery now

at the edge of town, how did I get here?

By the time Clare was institutionalized for "madness" 

he must have asked the same question. 

He maintained a sense of self-awareness even as he 

struggled with his temperament:

I am in that muddy melancholy again--my ideas keep swimming 

and shiftingin sleepy drowziness from one thing to another--

this letter will denote the crazy crackd braind fellow it has left behind.

Clare's poetry is at its best when making connections between 

the world of nature and the lost innocence of humanity. 

Birds, flowers and trees represent the ineffable beauty of nature 

while simultaneously standing  for the indiscriminate transience 

of life. He would so identify with nature he would literally 

adapt the voices of birds in his writing. 

Presaging by more than a century the mystic French composer, 

Olivier Messiaen  (who eccentrically chronicled hundreds of bird-calls 

he then transcribed into his scores), Clare wrote:

Of stranger witching notes was heard

As if it was a stranger bird:

"Wew-wew wew-wew chur-chur chur-chur

Woo-it woo-it"--could this be her?

"Tee-rew tee-rew tee-rew tee-rew

Chew-rit chew-rit"--and ever new--

"Ever new" indeed does Clare's poetry still read nearly two hundred years after the publication of his first visionary book. 

Wright's enigmatic poem ends with the surreal image of another poet (Garcia Lorca) speaking-- through the medium of a sparrow--a message of comfort we can only assume would have spoken to Clare, and all the other "crazy crackd braind" folks out there, reading, writing, dreaming, playing and praying their way through the world:

A sparrow limps past on its little bone crutch saying

I am Federico Garcia Lorca

risen from the dead--

literature will lose, sunlight will win, don't worry.

Britten Project: Take 1

As I wrote in my program notes for the upcoming VC concert, we are kicking-off an exciting venture with our Britten Project. Over the next five seasons we will explore and perform most of the a capella and small-scale choral works of the greatest composer to set the English language since Purcell. We will revisit old favorites like "Ceremony of Carols" and collaborate with the Virginia Children's Chorus on the early choral masterpiece, "A Boy was Born" and offer many of the short anthems and hymns, among other cycles and cantatas. We are starting with these performances of the "Five Flower Songs," and culminating in a St Cecilia Day-Britten Centennial concert on his birthday November 22, 2013 (OK, that's not on the books YET, but we're looking ahead...). It is fitting that one of the most prodigious and gifted composers of the 20th century was born on the name-day of the patron saint of music, St Cecilia.

As I was sharing with the singers following a rehearsal earlier this week, one of the traits that sets Britten apart from other vocal/choral composers is his facile and refined use of instrumental textures to shape his writing for voices. The most obvious example in the Flower Songs is the closing "Ballad of Green Broom" in which an anonymous poem is set like a folksong with guitar accompaniment. The melody is passed from voice to voice, while the other 3 accompanying voices sing short words that sound like plucked or strum guitar chords (in every varying arrangements, to accommodate the shifting voice of the melody--Tenor/SAB; Bass/SAT; etc). The poem is a ballad about a lazy young man--"without thought, without good" who is finally roused from lethargy to go to work as a woodsman--"cutting broom"-- and on his way passes by a Lady's "fine house" who calls for him to come and marry "a lady in full bloom"--seeing a way out of his labor "Johnny gave his consent/and to church they both went."

As the narrative picks up momentum, so does the tempo, and Britten varies the accompanying figures, building to a pair of dizzying duets where the voices literally chase one another (B/T followed by A/S). This tumbling section leads to a climactic verse where all 4 voices come together for the only time in the piece, an accomplished gesture that is punctuated with a virtuosic tag on the recurring emblematic phrase "green Broom."

Even when Britten is not emulating specifically instrumental techniques in his choral works, his use of texture is imaginative and varied. For example, the opening Flower Song, a bright arrangement of Robert Herrick's "To Daffodils" conjures the image of flowers blowing in the breeze. Paired voices frame the piece (S/B & A/T) in a charming duet. The middle section features the upper three voices in staccato chords (like offstage brass) while the basses pick up the melody from the opening soprano line under which they originally harmonized. The gently churning rhythm, the subtly shifting harmonies and textures mirror the poetic subject: flowers that "haste away so soon."

The second Herrick setting, "The Succession of the Four Sweet Months" echoes the Renaissance madrigal text perfectly. The four months, April-July, are taken up by the four voices in a classic miniature of imitative polyphony, as befitting its madrigalesque subject. Britten finishes this song with a succinct demonstration of his craftsmanship: a five bar codetta featuring each part with its respective month (S=April, A=May, T=June, B=July), the S & B outlining the home-key, while the inner voices flirt with a harmonic modulation unpredictable enough to pique our interest to the final resolution.

The middle two works are the heart of this cycle, and feature two poets dear to Britten. George Crabbe lived on the same street in Aldeburgh Britten and Pears eventually would. Aldeburgh is an unforgettable place. A tiny sea-side town on the east coast of England, just far enough up to feel the chill of the North Sea in all but the warmest months, it is surrounded by marshes and wetlands which lend it a special aura and fill it with memorable aromas. Aldeburgh has amazing fish and chips, which are best enjoyed sitting on the shingle as the imposing tide that inspired so much of Britten's music crashes at your feet. Crabbe wrote a book-length poem called The Borough, and it would inspire Britten's first opera, Peter Grimes, which catapulted the barely 30-year-old composer to fame. Peter Grimes is an outcast--a loner, a dreamer, a melancholy & troubled man who struggles in professional and personal life, to put it blandly. Britten and Pears identified with the loner & dreamer outcast in Grimes. His struggle between good and evil, innocence and corruption would parallel a leitmotif that would weave through Britten's work, culminating in his last opera, Death in Venice.

That is all to say the juxtaposition of Crabbe's "Marsh Flowers" with the mad, outcast, "peasant poet" John Clare's "Evening Primrose" is significant, and requires our attention. Never mind that Britten, a copious letter reader and writer and chronicler of his whereabouts and goings on where his and Pears' life and work were concerned did not even mention the Flower songs until AFTER they were completed (and this is unusual). And even then he did not have much to say about them, other than drawing an inquiring conductor's attention to the connection between "Marsh Flowers" and Peter Grimes! So, I find it telling that the harsh, acerbic world of the miniature masterpiece that is "Marsh Flowers" comes from the same source that inspired the first of Britten's intensely personal dozen-or-so operas. The Borough (=Aldeburgh--ie: a small town filled with, among other things, gossip...familiar, anyone?!?) represents the judgmental, closed, hypocritical "status quo" against which the artist/outsider/outcast struggles. "Marsh Flowers" ostensibly chronicles some of the more unpleasant flora in the salt-marsh and sea-side town, but it is a short leap to the metaphor comparing the "poisoned stings" of the "fiery nettle" to the harsh treatment from small-town opprobrium. Britten sets paired voice against one another (this time S/T and A/B) and the angular descriptors of the flora are exchanged in sinewy lines with short, dissonant stings. Britten sets the pairs in contrary motion so that crossing melodies mean crossing harmonies, peppered with mixed thirds (ie: a & a# simultaneously). The "fiery nettle" is set with a dramatic portamento (slide) up the octave for all four voices, and its "poison'd stings" painted with a texture that performs the poetic image with twisted melodies, harmony and rhythm. A double canon (T imitating S, B following A) mirrors the image of the fern growing "in ev'ry chink." The wind-tossed seaweed inspires another colorful bit of word-painting, as the paired voices sing their dissonant duet in contrary motion so they are literally "rolling up and down."

John Clare was a younger contemporary of Crabbe and one of the greatest of England's unschooled poets. Like another Britten muse, Christopher Smart (poet of "Rejoice in the Lamb" and source of my cat Jeoffry's name), Clare was institutionalized for madness. Or what is known today as bipolar disorder. So, another melancholy and troubled artist, another outcast & loner, and another muse. "Evening Primrose" is the beautiful heart of the cycle, an intimate, shimmering part-song about a delicate flower that blooms once, and only at night (=out of sight). A rustic poet, Clare (like his more famous Scots elder, Robert Burns) was fond of the double-entendre erotic image (this trait runs through every generation of poets, and the best of them, like Robert Frost, hide it beneath other layers of significance). Thus, the sensual: "And dewdrops pearl the evening breast," The sexual awakening: "The evening primrose opes anew," and, among others, the impotent: "it faints and withers and is gone." This is meant in NO way to demean, debase (or deflower?) Clare's poetry but is offered as a legitimate reading of the poetic images. I don't think Britten was conscious of these images in his setting. His setting reflects a tuning to the images of the flower as sensitive, ephemeral soul (like the creative work and the creative artist). The song alternates between exquisitely harmonized homophonic phrases, and brief oscillating lines in canon. The only extroverted moment in this beautiful miniature comes at the lines "Thus it blooms on while night is by;/When day looks out with open eye," and thus resembles that late blaze of glory before sunset, the last surge of life before death, as the poem concludes:
"Bashed at the gaze it cannot shun,/It faints and withers and is gone."

Silver Jubilee Program Notes

We begin our Silver Jubilee concert with one of the most ambitious works in the popular catalogue of the Los Angeles-based composer, Eric Whitacre. Leonardo Dreams of His Flying Machine made Whitacre the youngest composer ever commissioned by the esteemed American Choral Directors Association for its national convention in 2001. “What would it sound like if Leonardo Da Vinci were dreaming?” the composer asks, and his answer, in the form of an “opera bréve” is this 9 minute choral fantasia. Charles Anthony Silvestri’s “libretto bréve” inspires a pastiche of Renaissance-inspired voice leading, virtuoso coloratura reminiscent of Baroque opera, neo-romantic tone clusters, repetitive, minimalist dance-like figures, all filtered through a sensibility owing as much to pop music from the 60’s to today.

Next, we celebrate composers who have been good friends with and to us. John Dixon is a vital voice in our fine arts community: an accomplished composer, performer, teacher, and an arts executive. That Renaissance-man personality is evident in his poignant setting from Wordsworth’s poetry, Ode on Immortality. Libby Larsen is one of the most prominent women composers in our country’s history. Larsen has worked closely with many of our local arts organizations, and we are proud to continue to program the music of this distinguished artist. Alleluia is a short choral scherzo, exploiting contrasting textures with dancing rhythms and piquant harmonies. Like Larsen, Stephen Paulus is a fellow Minnesotan, and friend to the Chorale and choruses around the country. His elegant, sing-able music is on transparent display in the beautiful chorale, Pilgrims’ Hymn, setting a poem by his frequent collaborator, Michael Dennis Browne.

Amy Scurria is another exciting new voice in contemporary music and another composer with strong ties to the Commonwealth. A winner of the 1991 Northern Virginia Composition Competition, she has gone on to receive prestigious commissions from the Minnesota and Philadelphia Orchestras. Press Onward was a work I commissioned in 2001 for the Shepherd College (now University) Concert Choir. With rhythmic vitality inspired by the title of Christina Rossetti’s poem, the ebullient setting is reflective of its composer’s gift for immediate and affecting music. Sir Richard Rodney Bennett is one of Britten’s successors, and his A Good-Night is testimony to that fact. Written at the request of Paul McCartney, Bennett’s gentle lullaby setting of Francis Quarles’ metaphysical poem is a memorial tribute to Linda McCartney. It is the concluding contribution to A Garland for Linda, a project honoring her life while raising awareness about breast cancer. An even newer voice on the British scene is the dynamic young composer, Tarik O’Regan. O vera digna hostia begins in tone clusters that open with prismatic luminosity, and then quickly dissolve into a stream of flowing wordlessness while a chant-like melody intones the ancient text attributed to St. Wulfstan. The cluster chords return and the two textures intertwine to bring this evocative work to a close.

Our first half comes to a close with the world premiere performance of Robert Convery’s The Little Fishes of the Sea. From the moment I applied for this coveted position, I asked many “what if?” questions. The easiest to answer was what composer I’d ask for a 25th Anniversary Commission: my colleague and dear friend, Robert Convery. Those who attended this season’s Holiday concerts had the pleasure of hearing his sublime carol, Christmas Daybreak. You will soon hear how Convery’s gifts for melodic grace and harmonic efficacy combine with an impeccable poetic ear and the rare gift of a truly human sensibility. Some composers excel at cantabile (ie: singing) melody, others at fluid harmony. Some have a keen dramatic sense and others a fine-tuned wit. Robert Convery possesses all of these gifts, and I believe deserves a place in the tradition of great vocal composers of the English language that stretches from Purcell to Britten.

The second half of our Silver Jubilee program opens with a pair of contrasting pieces from one of our dearest friends, Adolphus Hailstork. Never mind that Hailstork is one of the greatest African-American composers we have—he is one of the greatest composers we have, period. In 1995, the Chorale (then the McCullough Singers) released an all-Hailstork CD. It is our privilege to revisit some of these shorter works from Hailstork’s impressive canon, which includes music of every genre. Crucifixion combines an idiomatic sensibility indebted to the music of the Black tradition, especially the spiritual. Yet it is boldly original and in no way derivative. The Cloths of Heaven (from the same collection, Five Short Choral Works) is a strikingly beautiful setting of William Butler Yeats beloved poem. Using harmonic language redolent of French impressionism and American jazz, Hailstork weaves a fabric evoking “…golden and silver light/The blue and the dim and the dark cloths/Of night and light and the half-light.”

In addition to the celebration of composers whose works we’ve championed the past 2-½ decades, we’re proud to launch an initiative to cultivate the next generation of composers through our Student Composers contest. We are equally proud to begin a project revisiting and exploring the rich body of choral music from one of the medium’s giants, Benjamin Britten. Britten was that rare breed of human being, the prodigy. The Hymn to the Virgin we offered last December was a high school composition. His first major choral work, A Boy was Born, appeared while he was a student at the Royal College of Music under John Ireland. Following his studies, he apprenticed in Government-sponsored jobs writing music for films, theatre, and radio, and began an important friendship with the great poet, philosopher, and pundit, W. H. Auden. Like Auden, Britten emigrated to the U.S. as WWII proliferated and threatened more of Europe. He toured North America with his new collaborative partner, the tenor, Peter Pears, and it was in Grand Rapids, Michigan the duo consummated a personal relationship that would last until Britten’s death nearly 40 years later. The greatest art songs of the 20th century, the most important operas in the English language, and some of the best concert music written since WWII are the result of this extraordinary collaboration.

Following several years spent primarily in New York, Britten and Pears returned home. Following a slightly bumpy transition through Conscientious Objectors tribunals and the accompanying critical acrimony, Britten established himself as the bright star of British music, with Pears as his muse and mouthpiece. The decade following his return to Britain in 1942 is often referred to as his “English” period. From the opera that heralded his newfound status, Peter Grimes, to the coronation opera for Elizabeth II, Gloriana, Britten wrote works of all shapes & sizes indebted to his native land, its marine geography, and the people who storied it. The Five Flower Songs come from this fecund period. With the designation of op. 47, this cycle joins the dozens of others written by a composer still in his 30’s. Britten and Pears shared a deep love of poetry and a knack for collating various poems into collections. Pears deserves special credit for his still under-acknowledged role in shaping both the opera libretti and the cycles of art songs and choral works. It is poetic justice we begin our Britten Project with a cycle the composer wrote for the Silver wedding anniversary of his botanist friends, Leonard and Dorothy Elmhirst. To Daffodils and The Succession of the Four Sweet Months, from the Elizabethan poet, Robert Herrick, establish the madrigal tenor of this affecting cycle. The first features effervescent exchanges between the voices and evokes the temporal aspect of its subject with incisive declamation, “We have short time to stay; as you./We have as short a Spring.” The months invoked in the second song, April to July, enter with each successive section—soprano to bass—and display Britten’s gift for imitative polyphony and the aural images such textures evoke. Marsh Flowers is a brief excerpt from the book-length poem by George Crabbe, The Borough. It was an article about the Aldeburgh poet that caused Britten to return home and begin work on his first opera. The abrasive, judgmental towns-people of the Borough play a central role in Peter Grimes, and the severe qualities of the flora and fauna in Britten’s and Crabbe’s native county, Suffolk, here serve as symbols. Evening Primrose is Britten at his most intimate, and it is not difficult to read layers of significance in the juxtaposition of Crabbe’s poem with another outcast, the “mad” poet, John Clare. Britten’s and Pears’ affinity with these poets and their autobiographical subjects is striking, as is their shared predilection for the hidden meanings of metaphors. The anonymous Ballad of Green Broom, another study in effective choral textures, quickly restores the extroverted levity to close the cycle with an accomplished flourish.

We close our 25th Anniversary celebration with a benediction in the shape of an exquisite nocturne. A Carol for All Children is one of Hailstork’s most beloved pieces and a favorite of singers and audiences alike. With a poem by the composer, its direct and sincere wish that peace, love and joy “in each heart be keeping,” reflects the sentiments of an organization grateful for the trust these past 25 years have proved.

Brush Up Your Shakespeare

Brush up Your Shakespeare

Amy and I are in Roanoke for a concert and educational outreach residency. Sunday, March 29 we present a recital, "Shakespeare in Song." (www.operaroanoke.org)

March 27 we led an inservice for Roanoke County English and music teachers on Shakespeare and the arts. We started that enjoyable workshop with the quiz below:

I. Match the song to the play:

1. O mistress mine! Where are you roaming?
O stay and hear; your true love’s coming,
That can sing both high and low.
Trip no further, pretty sweeting;
Journey’s end in lovers meeting,
Every wise man’s son doth know.

2. It was a lover and his lass,
With a hey, and a ho, and hey nonino,
That o’er the green corn-field did pass
In the spring time, the only pretty ring time,
When birds do sing, hey ding-a-ding, ding;
Sweet lovers love the spring.

3. Come away, come away death,
And in sad cypress let me be laid.
Fly away, fly away breath,
I am slain by a fair cruel maid:
My shroud of white, stuck all with yew,
O prepare it.
My part of death no one so true
Did share it.

4. Who is Sylvia? What is she
That all our swains commend her?
Holy, fair, and wise is she,
The heaven such grace did lend her,
That she might admired be.

5. When daises pied and violets blue
and lady-smocks all silver-white
And cuckoo-buds of yellow hue
Do paint the meadows with delight,
The cuckoo then on every tree
Mocks married men, for thus sings he,
Cuckoo! Cuckoo! Cuckoo!

6. Fear no more the heat o’ the sun,
Nor the furious winter’s rages;
Thou thy worldly task hast done,
Home are gone, and ta’en thy wages;
Golden lads and girls all must
As chimney-sweepers, come to dust.

A. As you like it
B. Two Gentlemen of Verona
C. Love’s Labours Lost
D. Cymbeline
E. Twelfth Night

II. Complete the quote: for extra credit, name its source, and extra-extra credit, the speaker!

1. We are such stuff as dreams are made on:

2. But soft! What light through yonder window breaks?

3. Now is the winter of our discontent

4. To be or not to be

5. Is this a dagger which I see before me,

III. The following quotes or phrases inspired the titles of other works.
Name the play and the new work.

1. The Sound and the Fury

2. A Heart so White

3. What dreams may come

4. Brave New World

5. The Undiscovered Country

IV. Mixed Doubles: Match the pairs of lovers

1.
X: I will swear by it that you love me,
and I will make him eat it that says I love not you.
Y: Will you not eat your word?

2.
Y: If it be love indeed, tell me how much.
X: There’s beggary in the love
that can be reckoned
Y: Celerity is never more admired
than by the negligent.
X: A good rebuke, which might have well
becomed the best of men
to taunt at slackness.

3.
X. Thus from my lips by thine
my sin is purged
Y: Then have my lips the sin
that they have took.

4.
X: What too curious dreg espies my sweet
lady in the fountain of our love?
Y: More dregs than water
if my fears have eyes.
X: Fears make devils of cherubims;
They never see truly.
Y: Blind fear that seeing reason leads,
finds safer footing than blind reason,
stumbling without fear.
To fear the worst oft cures the worse.

5.
X: Thy virtue spoke of and thy beauty
sounded yet not so deeply as to thee
belongs myself am moved to woo
thee for my wife.
Y: Moved in good time!
Let him that mov’d you hither,
remove you hence.

A. Romeo and Juliet
B. Beatrice and Benedick
C. Petruchio and Kate
D. Antony and Cleopatra
E. Troilus and Cressida

Match the adaptation to the original:

1. West Side Story
2. The Boys from Syracuse
3. Prospero’s Book
4. Scotland, PA
5. Kiss Me Kate
6. I Capuletti e Montecchi
7. The Sea and the Mirror


A. The Comedy of Errors
B. MacBeth
C. The Tempest
D. The Taming of the Shrew
E. Romeo and Juliet


Answers:
Part I: Songs
1. E; 2. A; 3. E; 4. B; 5. C; 6. D

Part II: Quotes
1. We are such stuff as dreams are made on:
and our little life is rounded with a sleep
The Tempest, Prospero

2. But soft! What light through yonder window breaks?
It is the east, and Juliet is the Sun.
R & J; Romeo

3. Now is the winter of our discontent
Made glorious summer by this sun of York
Richard III; Richard

4. To be or not to be: that is the question
Hamlet

5. Is this a dagger which I see before me,
The handle toward my hand?
Macbeth

Part III: Borrowed titles
1. Macbeth/Faulkner novel
2. Macbeth/Marias novel
3. Hamlet/Ward film (w/Robin Williams)
4. Tempest/Huxley novel
5. Hamlet/Star Trek film

Part IV:Mixed doubles
1. B; 2. D; 3. A; 4. E; 5. C

Part V: Adaptations
1. E; 2. A; 3. C; 4. B; 5. D; 6. E; 7. C

It is fascinating to revisit the plays and their songs in context. Most of us know "Who is Sylvia" in one version or another. We will begin our recital with Schubert's three settings of Shakespeare in German translations, and "An Sylvia" is the opener. We are offering multiple settings of the song lyrics in the first half of the program. So the Schubert will be followed by Finzi's "Let us Garlands Bring" (a Shakespeare set written in honor of the 70th birthday of his friend, mentor, and adopted "uncle" Ralph Vaughan Williams). Finzi's "Who is Sylvia?" is as cheerful as Schubert's and since "Two Gentleman of Verona" is rarely taught or produced, one misses the Shakespearean irony of this serenade in the middle of a scene where the "Gentleman" Proteus is showing the true colors of his despicable character. The context of one of the most popular song lyrics, "It was a lover and his lass" ("As You Like It") contains a prime example of Shakespearean wit. The jester, Touchstone responds to the exiled Duke's pages, who have just sung the song:

--Truly young gentlemen, though there was no great matter
in the ditty, yet the note was untuneable.
--You are deceived, sir. We kept time.
We lost not out time.
--By my troth yes. I count it but time lost
to hear such a foolish song. God buy you,
and God mend your voices.

We will sing three very different settings of this favorite lyric: I will sing Finzi's and Amy will sing Korngold's. We will share a duet by Roger Quilter. The Finzi treats the lyric as a stand-alone song, while the duet matches the play's setting of two singers, and Korngold's music comes closest to capturing the ironic wit of the scene.

As Harold Bloom writes in his exhaustive (and sometimes exhausting) "Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human" we owe much of how we interpret life in this world to Shakespeare. The number of quotes that have remained common currency, the unparalleled range of characters--from Kings & Queens to lovers, fools, & families--span the gamut of human experience. The juxtaposition of tragedy and comedy, "high" characters and "low" characters seems odd until we realize real life is exactly like that. Other authors have a singular enough style to become adjectives: Proustian descriptiveness, Checkovian humanism and Dickensian realism, for example. None ranks higher than Shakespeare. And while there may be similarities between the work of say, Verdi, and Checkov, we honor Verdi with the supreme compliment of calling his characters Shakespearean. Incidentally, that last adjective is the only one of the above not underlined in red by my laptop's spellchecker.

We don't have time or space for Shakespeare's vocabulary, but ours is richer for it. Shakespeare is the ultimate teacher. In the inservice that opened with the quiz, I closed with the following excerpts, dubbed "life lessons from some of the great speeches." (For brevity's sake, I'm not reprinting the entire speeches, but the act and scenes are included after each play, for reference).

Jacque’s “7 Stages” speech from As you Like it, II.vii:
"All the world's a stage
And all the men and women merely players:
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts."

Polonius’ advice to Laertes from Hamlet; I.iii:
"And these few precepts in thy memory
Look thou character. Give thy thoughts no tongue,
Nor any unproportion'd thought his act.
Be thou familiar, but by no means vulgar;"

Hamlet’s “existentialist” musings:
From II.ii:
"I have of late--but wherefore I know not--
Lost all my mirth, forgone all custom of exercises;
and indeed it goes so heavily with my disposition
that this goodly frame, the earth, seems to me
like a sterile promontory;"

and from III.i:
"To be, or not to be: that is the question:
Whether tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them?"

Falstaff's advice for the good life, from Henry IV, pt. 2; IV.iii:
"A good sherry sack hath a two-fold operation in it.
It ascends me into the brain; dries me there all the foolish
and dull and crudy vapours which environ it; makes it
apprehensive, quick, forgetive, full of nimble fiery
and delectable shapes; which, deliver'd over to the voice,
the tongue, which is the birth, becomes excellent wit."

Cleopatra’s eulogy for Antony from A&C; V.ii:
"His face was as the heavens, and therein stuck
A sun and moon, which kept their course, and lighted
The little O, the earth.
His legs bestrid the ocean; his rear'd arm
Crested the world; his voice was propertied
As all the tuned spheres..."

Launce’s devotion to his dog, Crab, from Two Gentlemen of Verona; IV.iv:
"When a man's servant shall play the cur with him, look you,
it goes hard; one that I brought up of a puppy; one that I saved from drowning,
when three or four of his blind brothers and sisters went to it.
I have taught him, even as one would say precisely, "Thus would I teach a dog."

Prospero’s farewell from The Tempest; IV.i:
"Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits and
Are melted into air, into thin air:
And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-clapp'd towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep."

Letter to DFW (1962-2008)

Dear David:

I may understand. I just freaked out myself
and suddenly started pounding my head
with my fists. You said you wore a bandana
to keep yours from exploding. Henze is doing
just that right now in his Dionysian Third
on my ipod (Yes. That means I have a Henze
playlist. And an extensive one at that).

What we do matters. Despite what
the critics in Poetry magazine write,
we don't do it for recognition.
Like you said, we do it to prove
our status as human beings.
We do it to live.
If not to give meaning,
then to offer multiple readings--
alternate takes--on life.

And even though you left
yours unfinished (does anyone
really, truly finish...)
You made a difference, man.
You lodged stories and characters
where they will stay for who knows how long.
(Who says fiction isn't real?!?)
What we do matters. Art matters.
How else can one make sense
of life--much less approach death?
(this should be an endnote,
a la Infinite Jest, but alas,
it is merely parenthetical:
religion as art; philosophy as art;
relationship as art--all creative acts.
Every leap--whether aesthetic, ontological,
existential--is an imaginative feat,
a stance, a statement
both of will and being)

Yet we shouldn't be so hard
on ourselves. Or our work.
The restless, insatiable,
demanding ones (and if not
indefatigable, then relentlessly
searching, questioning, attempting)
should give ourselves a break
before we break ourselves.
(I didn't mean for that to
veer into cliche. Yikes.
Please forgive me)
What I meant to say was:
You lived the questions into art
and cracked open claustrophobic spaces.
In the process of your
unbecoming you left us
something, and that matters.

Serenade & Night Flight: Britten & Dallapiccola

In one of the pithy essays from his masterpiece collection, Labyrinths, Jose Luis Borges writes of "Kafka and his Precursors." In typical Borgesian fashion, a connective thread is woven from Aristotle to Browning to Kierkegaard, with pit-stops along the way. Borges says that our connection to the present (ie: Kafka) directly informs our interpretation of the past (ie: Browning) rather than the chicken-and-egg assumption that the past affects how we interpret the present. Therefore, "every writer creates his own precursors" and therefore performs the Borgesian task of making connections across time and space in the labyrinthine world in which we find ourselves.

Last weekend I had the privilege of performing Benjamin Britten's Serenade for Tenor, Horn and Strings with the fabulous hornist, Joe Levinsky, and the Maryland Symphony Orchestra, led by one of the country's outstanding conductor's, Elizabeth Schulze. The Maryland Symphony was founded over a quarter of a century ago by the British conductor and horn player, Barry Tuckwell. Fitting that Tuckwell was a champion of the Serenade, and is the soloist in one of the definitive recordings of the work, which also features its other creators: Britten himself is the conductor, and the tenor is his partner & collaborator, Peter Pears.

In an earlier post, I wrote about Music and Social Conscience--inspired by the conflation of January's historic Inauguration, concerts I was preparing to conduct and programs I was preparing to propose--and referenced Britten and his output. His life and music are themes to which I regularly return: besides being the greatest composer of the English language and one of the giants of 20th c. music, he was the source of my DMA dissertation, and the raison-d'etre behind much of my work in the UK, and is simply one of my favorite composers. I find Britten's music to be more relevant now than ever, and all of these signifiers inform the fact that the Virginia Chorale will be devoting a portion of each of our next five seasons to surveying Britten's choral works in our Britten Project, culminating in a centennial concert for his birthday in 2013, which just happens to be the name day of the Patron Saint of Music, St. Cecilia (Nov 22).

Anyway, Britten's Serenade is the quintessential example of this composer's gift for creating a song-cycle from a poetic anthology. Britten is unique among vocal composers in amassing a body of song-cycles both on individual poets (Rimbaud, Michelangelo, Donne, Hardy, Hölderlin, Pushkin, Blake, et al) and on original "librettos" of anthologized poets (three of his five orchestral song-cycles, Our Hunting Fathers, Serenade, and Nocturne, use this device of multi-voiced lyrics as their source).

One of the most dog-eared books in my own collection is "Britten's Poets: An anthology of the poems he set to music." It is nearly 400 pages of nothing but the poems themselves. One of the indices lists the poets Britten set, and it includes nearly 100 different poets in a half-dozen different languages. I should also add that Pears was Britten's literary equal, if not the more well-read of the two, and his assistance in choosing and ordering the poetic sequences has been under-appreciated.

Britten finished the Serenade, op. 31, in the spring of 1943, before he turned 30. It was his first major opus to be premiered following his and Pears' return to the UK from self-imposed, conscientious-objector exile in the US. His status as a C.O. affected his life on several levels (he had to appeal to the tribunal, and was granted his exempt status only after a second appearance; his friend and colleague, the composer Michael Tippett, served time when his application for C.O. status was rejected). It also deepened his lifelong commitment to pacifism & non-violence, and furthered the conviction that the creative artist contribute to society.

At the time, Britten was just beginning work on his first opera, Peter Grimes, whose success would establish his fame and further his reputation as the leading composer of his generation. Britten and Pears both identified with Grimes' themes of isolation, outcast, and exile--as artists, as conscientious objectors, and as homosexual men. These themes--also incarnate as innocence and experience, youth and age, virtue and corruption, individual and the people--would populate his operas and infuse his song cycles for the remaining three decades of his astounding career.

The Serenade is framed by a prologue and epilogue with the horn playing natural harmonics, recalling the (innocent?) days when the instrument was associated with hunting calls. In between, 6 poems (spanning several centuries of British verse) take up nocturnal themes from dusk and twilight to dreams, nightmares, and visions. Britten creates a distinct sound-world for each, informed by the poetry itself. The first setting, Charles Cotton's crepuscular evocation of the sunset, uses the poetic images of the shape-shifting twilight as material for a dialogue between the tenor and horn. The second song, "Nocturne" is a setting of Tennyson's Ireland-inspired lyric "The splendour falls on Castle walls" and features an infectious recurring exchange between the tenor and horn, evoking the echoes resounding from the majestic mountainous setting. Britten was a prodigy, a "natural," and this is nowhere more evident than in the architecturally balanced form of his major works. The central movements of the Serenade are linked by a shared motive, first heard in the horn in the "Elegy" (Blake's "The sick rose) and taken up by the tenor in the anonymous "Dirge." The Elegy features the most extended horn solo, and exploits the technical and expressive capabilities of the instrument (Britten praised the original dedicatee, Dennis Brain, as having the facility of a clarinettist). The Blake poem, ostensibly about the "invisible worm" that poisons the Rose from the inside out, is a metaphor for any kind of sickness (syphilis or cancer ) sin, and/or evil itself--whether the specter of fascism, totalitarianism, or the "benign" evil of conformity or repression. Interestingly, Britten uses a 12-tone row for the "invisible worm" in the horn melody. Never a disciple of Schoenberg's school, he did admire Alban Berg's more lyrical use of 12-tone techniques, and the grafting of the chromatic tone-row within tonal contexts. The Elegy's intensity is matched by the relentless toll of the Dirge, which assigns the tenor 8 consecutive verses of morality-play inspired verse in excruciating tessiturra. While Britten downplayed the importance of the Serenade in his letters ("nothing important, but quite pleasant, I'd like to think") participants on both sides of the stage are apt to take a different view from the central movements. The Dirge is relieved by the exquisite setting of Ben Jonson's paean to Diana, goddess of the moon, in the "Hymn." The horn takes off and the tenor hopes to keep up in this exemplary setting of Britten's mastery of yet another form, the scherzo. Following the "excellently bright" song to the moon, the horn exits to prepare for the offstage epilogue, and the tenor intones Keats haunting sonnet to sleep "O soft embalmer of the still midnight." Britten's mastery of vocal shading, string scoring, liquid harmonies and dramatic shape--encapsulated in a single movement--is nowhere on better display than here.

Immediately following the 2 memorable performances of the Britten (on 2/14 & 2/15), I headed up to NYC for a concert version of Luigi Dallapiccola's first opera, the one-act version of Antoine Saint-Exupery's (The Little Prince) novel, "Night Flight." Dallapiccola (1904-1975) is the greatest Italian composer of the 20th century, and one of the great voices of social conscience--"music of commitment" was his own term for his works. A victim of racial and political prejudice as a youth in the first world war, he was acutely sensitive to the precarious position of the individual in a totalitarian regime. His wife, Laura, was Jewish, and Mussolini's race laws forced the couple into hiding in the mid-30's, just as Dallapiccola was finding his voice.

Like Britten, he admired Berg and along with the Austrian composer, is the greatest exponent of lyrical melody within dodecaphony (12-tone, fully chromatic, atonal music, in a nut-shell). The opening theme of 'Volo di Notte' is a cantabile (singing) 12-tone row for a solo viola over a luminous series of B-major triads. The theme is associated with light and the stars, and returns near the end of the opera when the lost pilot is flying over the sea, ascending to the stars (and his imminent death).

The story is ostensibly about the "night flights" in South America and across the Atlantic to Europe just as WWII was clouding that continent. The pilot, Fabien, is lost as storms surround his flight, the operators on the ground are powerless to help, and the imperious commander, Riviere, is weighed down by his insistence on continuing the night flights, even as he loses one of his pilots. Like much great art, Volo di Notte works on several levels. Dallapiccola was impressed by the figure of Riviere--a man of great will power, vision, and strength, who is looking to the future, and balancing the responsibilities of the tasks (and lives) under his command. Riviere is also a complex and difficult character, who appears implacable in the face of his pilot's fate, is quick to put his subordinates in their places, eschews intimacy and love, and even the semblance of interpersonal relationships. I have the privilege of portraying the Radio-telegrapher who communicates the status of the strengthening storms (an obvious metaphor for 1937). Fascinatingly, in the Saint-Exupery novel, the storms are likened to a "worm in fruit...ripe to rottenness" --a Borgesian reference to Blake's elegy, and another (if unconscious) link between these two great 20th century composers.

About 2/3'rd of the way through the opera (the "vanishing point"--follow Borgesian trail to previous entry on Roberto Bolaño, inquiring readers) the Radio-telegrapher finally makes contact with Fabien, and from that point until the pilot's disappearance, the telegrapher assumes the voice and character of the pilot, in a music that is as violent as the storms and as transcendent as an outer-body experience of soaring to the stars. This great scene ends with Fabien's beatific vision of the stars, accompanied by the original theme (this time sung wordless by a soprano). Dallapiccola uses a wide range of declamatory techniques (again, indebted to Schoenberg and Berg, but wholly original) and calls for 4 different types of declamation: spoken text without pitch or specific rhythm, spoken text with assigned rhythmic values, a rhythmic declamation that is "as if without sound" and a Sprechstimme or Sprechgesang ("speak-singing") that is rhythmic and approximates pitch somewhere between speech and song. All of these techniques are used independently and in combination in this moving scene.

Dallapiccola would go on to write his two greatest works immediately following 'Volo di Notte.' Following Mussolini's tightening of the political reins, the composer realized "only by means of music would I be able to express my indignation" and wrote a set of choral pieces called "Canti di prigionia" (Songs of prisoners) and his greatest one-act opera, "Il Prigionero" (the Prisoner). Both involve specific characters and stories universalized by Dallapiccola's assimilation of dramatic form and musical technique. One of those techniques is to combine the cantabile-informed 12-tone rows with hints of gregorian chant (the Dies Irae--day of judgment), a technique that serves the dual purpose of grounding the music tonally & aurally, yet at a deeper level signifies the multi-layered, Borgesian aspect of art that transforms the particular into the universal. His music is difficult (and fitting for its subject matter), as relevant as ever, and representative of what great music of commitment can be.