verba docent

Obviously, I’m not the only person to have strong feelings about the relationship between words and music!  So I thought that it would be nice to hear from other people throughout the festival about their own ideas and experiences.  I’ve asked some singers to write down their ideas, as well as some conductor colleagues; over the next few weeks, I’ll share their thoughts with you.

I’m kicking off this series with Martha Hollander, an alto in Dessoff, who is uniquely positioned to talk about the both words and music.  She is a poet (as is her father, John Hollander), and has been singing for most of her life.  Martha is also an art historian who specializes in 17th century Dutch art; you can read more about her in her biography from Hofstra University, where she teaches: http://www.hofstra.edu/Faculty/fac_profiles.cfm?id=681.  I can attest to her expertise; when we were in Mexico City last June, she provided outstanding advice on my purchase of a Mexican landscape painting!

What I HADN’T known is that Martha is descending from musical theater ‘royalty’!  What a cool connection.  Here it is, in Martha’s words… enjoy!

I can’t remember a time when I haven’t either sung or listened to singing. When I was a kid, my parents sang me to sleep with Renaissance duets, folk songs, protest songs, and silly parodies from their childhoods. They taught me to sightsing, and we’d read through madrigal books. On long car trips, we’d run through everything we knew. (My sister and I had our specialty: we’d sing the entire first two sides of the Beatles’ White Album from the back seat.)

When my great-uncle Frank Loesser died, we inherited a box of sheet music, mostly show tunes and old parlor-songs. My father and I would muddle through them: he played, I sang. What we lacked in skill we made up for in enthusiasm.

Being immersed in this stuff, and as a reader and writer of poems, I feel that singing can’t help being a kind of conversation – not just with other performers, or an audience, but also between the words and music. Singing wordsis doing them justice.  And isn’t that what setting a text is – to do it justice, to interpret it in some way beyond just reading it to yourself, or aloud?  Not just an analogy to the text, but a reinvention?

I often try to imagine what a setting of a poem would be like. How do composers do it? I’m fascinated by the way they take ideas, chunks of texts, rhythms and sounds, and remake them. What prompts them to set the poem in the first place?  Do they follow or ignore the line breaks? Rhymes, if any? How do they “translate” mood and atmosphere?

I especially like settings that veer away from the obvious, but find other parallels.  For example, achingly sad texts are often set in major keys. Having sung Ricky Ian Gordon’s subtle setting of Langston Hughes’ ”Luck,”  I’m especially struck by the ending: “To some people/Love is given,/To others,/Only heaven.” For all its gentleness, Gordon’s music keeps very tight and tense, on slightly “off” unresolved chords that invite us to hear the ambiguity of the text: is love better than heaven? Here’s a sensual version for three singers, performed by Sherry Boone, Theresa Hamm Smith and Michael Lofton.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EBTotGqsIZ0

Then there’s the reverse, in a totally different character: Britten’s Serenade for Tenor, Horn and Strings. In “Dirge,” the repetitive stanzas of a medieval poem are set to an identical melody each time, as in a traditional ballad, but the accompaniment constantly shifts––feverish strings; horn suddenly roaring in at Stanza 6––reinventing the melody into a new harmonic, and emotional, entity. Fittingly, the piece begins and ends a cappella: practically a textbook example of what to do with a repetitive text. (This is the superb 1964 recording I grew up with, sung by Peter Pears, with Barry Tuckwell on the horn.)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q88svqsTgYQ

Sometimes words can rhyme on the page, but sound entirely different when sung.  Frank’s setting of his own lyrics for “My Time of Day,” from Guys and Dolls, sounds almost like a through-composed, single utterance, flowing naturally from the dialogue just preceding it. Here’s Peter Gallagher, from the 1992 revival, singing, and speaking, to Josie de Guzman.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WrgZTqWlEMs

This isn’t strictly poetry…but I couldn’t resist.

UPDATE:  We will be postponing the masterclass because of the storm!  More information later about rescheduling…

In the meantime, I’m posting here the bios and clips from the other three masterclass participants…

Michael Blume

Michael Blume

Michael Blume’s blend of dynamic performance and soulful, honest vocals  has established him as one of Yale University’s top up-and-coming r&b/pop artists.  Having spent last year touring with the world-renowned Whiffenpoofs of Yale, Michael is currently in his last semester of school and performs frequently in the New Haven area. Combining elements of gospel, pop, soul, and jazz, Michael’s music speaks to listeners of all ages and backgrounds.  In addition to writing and performing, Michael has taught and conducted vocal ensembles in New Jersey, New York, New Haven, and Rio de Janeiro.

Audio file of “Cold and Lonely”

Philip Jameson

Philip Jameson

Philip Jameson is an Australian composer of orchestral and chamber music. He attended Sydney Grammar School on a music scholarship, where he studied piano with Ransford Elsley, organ with Robert Wagner and jazz with Dave Levy. During this time, he also studied composition with Richard Gill. He is currently an undergraduate student at Yale University.

Philip’s music is unashamedly melodic. The beauty of individual line is the highest priority in his work, although these lines often mingle in twisted, fantastical, even humorous ways. Philip is always looking to the past to inform his music, and is fond of appropriating such historic forms as Rondo, Variation, and Fugue. But the music Philip loves most is more recent, particularly that of the early twentieth century. His favourite composers are Igor Stravinsky, Maurice Ravel and Samuel Barber.

Philip’s music is heard mainly in his hometown, Sydney. The Sydney Symphony Sinfonia has played three of his works, including The Wind in the Hemlock, which the organisation commissioned in 2010. More recently, the Australian Youth Orchestra commissioned him to write a brass quintet, resulting in The Collatz Variations. This work subsequently shared third prize is the Franz Schubert Conservatory’s International Composition Competition for 2012. Philip is currently working on Contact, an orchestral suite for the Sydney Youth Orchestra, as well as a children’s opera and a string quartet.

Outside his life as a musician, Philip enjoys reading Greek and Roman poetry, particularly Homer’s Odyssey and Ovid’s Metamorphoses.  He is also a fan of crosswords and Breaking Bad. In the future, Philip intends to spend time on his skills as a conductor, so he can conduct his own operas and ballets.

Audio file– an extract from “Wind in the Hemlock” for mezzo-soprano and orchestra

Melissa Folzenlogen

Melissa Kingdom Folzenlogen

Melissa Folzenlogen is a 20 year old musician from several walks of life. A classically trained violinist, she attended Mannes pre-college for 9 years, as well as Fiorello Laguardia High School, Manhattan School of Music and ISO. Beginning in High School, she became interested in performing rock music, and formed the band Circadian Clock, in which she sings and writes the music for. She also works at Nightlife Productions, a recording studio where she traverses the ins and out of the music industry while recording and producing her band’s material with multi-platinum producer Sean Gill of ‘The Passengerz’. In addition to having played several notable venues over the years, (Don Hills, Sullivan Hall, and Ace of Clubs to name a few,) she has played back up guitar for celebrities like Foxy Brown and done session work for artists like Pasha (world famous accordion player). She has also made some appearances on TV as cast member ‘Random Melissa’ of the award winning ‘Chris Gethard Show’. Melissa is a young entertainer with experience, and is happy to share her music with you!

Today and tomorrow, I’m going to post photos, bios and in some cases sound files from the young composers who are participating in Saturday’s masterclass in songwriting.  It’s so exciting– I got in touch with a handful of either musical theater-style or ‘singer-songwriter’ style composers I knew, and the word spread!  So we have five composers in their late teens into their twenties, representing a wide range of musical styles.  It’ll be great to hear them (and in some cases, their friends) perform their music– and to hear Anna and Bill’s insights into the (re)writing process!

Enjoy…

Alex Ratner

Alex Ratner

Alex Ratner is currently a junior at Yale University and an aspiring musical theater composer and arranger.  Alex began writing music and lyrics at Stagedoor Manor, where he music directed a concert of his songs in 2009.  Alex contributed vocal arrangements to Tina Girlstar (New York Stage & Film Workshop, 2009), and he assisted composer Scott Frankel and orchestrator Bruce Coughlin on the preview production of Far From Heaven (dir. Michael Greif) last summer at Williamstown.  This year at Yale, Alex music directed Spring Awakening and Avenue Q, and he most recently was Assistant Musical Director of the concert production of Kiss Me, Kate, celebrating the 100th anniversary of Cole Porter’s graduation from Yale.  His latest project is entitled Glass Act, a new musical inspired by several J.D. Salinger stories including “A Perfect Day For Bananafish” and Franny and Zooey.

Here’s Alex’s song, “Norman Rockwell”:

mp3 of Norman Rockwell

Erica Kudisch

Erica Kudisch

Erica Kudisch is a founder of Treble Entendre productions and the composer and lyricist of the BDSM musical Dogboy & Justine. A NYC-based composer and coloratura soprano, her works have also been performed by Undercroft Opera (Pygmalion), Alia Musica Pittsburgh (The Wolf in the Woods, Three Poems by Cao Cao), The Tourmaline Quartet (The Destroyers), pianist Todd Crow (Conversion), and internationally renowned guitarist Marco Sartor (Heroes and Villains). As a lyricist, Erica has frequent collaborations with singers as a writer of parody and filk, and performs at the Stonewall Inn and the Way Station. Keep up with Treble Entendre’s and D&J‘s progress at www.dogboyandjustine.com!

 Here’s a sound clip of “Sweetheart, Darling, Angel” from Dogboy and Justine, with the lyrics below…

mp3 of Sweetheart, Darling Angel

TARA

Sweetheart, darling, angel,

That’s no way to treat a lady!

Won’t you get down on your knees

And say ‘I’m sorry, Tara, please!’

No, no, that isn’t all right.

You’re not the least bit contrite.

Oh dear, whatever shall I do with you?

No, you can’t make it up with kisses or with cuddles.

And there’s no way a simple diamond will suffice.

That you think you can get away with this befuddles me;

Now put your arms above your head and let me show you what’s nice.

PATSY ROBERTSON:  [yelling] Jesus Christ!

Sweetheart, darling, angel,

That’s no way to treat a lady!

Won’t you get down on your knees

And say ‘I’m sorry, Tara, please!’

If you want into my heart

Then let me take you apart.

Oh dear, whatever shall I do with you?

Looks like you need a little more than just a spanking.

And I will tell you when I think you’ve had enough.

And since it’s all for your own good, you should be thanking me!

Now that you’ve making such a mess, you’d better clean it all up.

Sweetheart, darling, angel,

That’s no way to treat a lady!

Won’t you get down on your knees

And say ‘I’m sorry, Tara, please!’

You’ve got some serious gall.

You aren’t sorry at all!

Oh dear, whatever shall I do with you?

Ooh~ Now you know that I adore you,

Ooh~ But you better know what’s in for you

[boopadeedoop~] If you don’t behave.

Honey sweetie pumpkin, you’re my naughtiest slave.

Sweetheart, darling, angel,

That’s no way to treat a lady!

Won’t you get down on your knees

And say ‘I’m sorry, Tara, please!’

You let that happen again,

You earn a world full of pain—

[PATSY ROBERTSON screams out something obscene, at length]

Oh, dear, does that mean that our time is through?

Whatever shall I do with you?

Anna K Jacobs

Since the TV show Smash started its second season this week, I suppose that our workshop and masterclass on Saturday is perfectly timed: the genesis for my idea behind LIFE OF A SONG: The Art of (Re)Writing came while watching that show last year.  I love the concept behind Smash—a behind-the-scenes look at the creation of a Broadway show.  The actors are great, the music is fun, the production is stylish… the only problem is that it’s just so unrealistic!

With very few exceptions, musicals take many years—up to a decade—to make the journey from inception to the Broadway stage.  There are writes and rewrites (and rewrites and rewrites), staged readings, more rewrites, workshops, more rewrites, out-of-town full-scale productions, more rewrites, special showcases for financial backers, more rewrites… well, you get the picture.  No matter how great the first draft is, a musical really only comes together through the willingness of the creative team to rethink, revise and rework their reaction at every possible juncture.

Bill Nelson

I have been lucky enough to watch this process up close with Anna K Jacobs and Bill Nelson as their musical Harmony, Kansas wends its way from birth to a staged reading in New York to an airing at the Festival of New Artists at the Goodspeed Opera House and more recently to a full production in San Diego.  Click here to read a review of the San Diego production (and a description of the show): http://www.stageandcinema.com/2012/07/13/harmony-kansas/

I have know Anna for many years—she sang with me in Australia, so I have followed her career with great interest.  In fact, Anna and Bill have spent a month each year working on the show in my house in Connecticut when I’m travelling, so I’ve been lucky enough to have played through the songs in their infancy and watched their development through different iterations of the score.  It turns out that I’m way more wed to their songs than they are!  Just when I fall in love with one of the songs, it gets ripped apart and reworked in order to work better in the show.  Theater composers are surprisingly brutal about this—if they weren’t, they could never suffer through the arduous process of bringing a show to a major venue.

So the idea for our workshop on Saturday is that Anna and Bill will talk us through just one of the songs from Harmony, Kansas, showing us why and how it was reworked in each new version of the show.  It really is a fascinating insight into the compositional process, and in terms of theme of our festival, it is also an intriguing glimpse into the relationship between the word-crafter and the music-crafter.  Both lyricist and composer must work in tandem to further the drama they are creating, adding an element to the collaboration that doesn’t exist in a non-theatrical form.

Here is a clip of one of the versions of the song that you’ll hear on Saturday.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=754qiv4Spa0

After Anna and Bill describe their own creative process, they will offer feedback to a slate of some wonderful young composers whose music ranges from musical theater to “singer-songwriter” style contemporary music.  Over the next few days, I’ll post bios of the masterclass participants.

Before I leave today, though—and because I’m such a fan of Anna’s music—I thought I’d also include a clip of a song from the musical Pop! that she wrote with Maggie-Kate Coleman, who wrote the book and lyrics.  It was produced by the Yale Repertory Theater and more recently by Pittsburgh’s City Theater.  The musical is about Andy Warhol and the hangers-on at The Factory.  This clip gives you another sense of Anna’s song-writing.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WhF-V-rnrdg

Ricky Ian Gordon

I teach every summer at the Hotchkiss Summer Portals chamber music program, a wonderful program for aspiring middle school and high school singers, violinists and pianists.  When our founding director, Robert Barker, retired from Portals, we wanted to mark his departure with a special piece.  My Hotchkiss colleague Melvin Chen, the incredible pianist and now associate dean at the Yale School of Music, suggested his friend Ricky Ian Gordon for the commission.  I was blown away– I had known Ricky’s music (and loved it), but never imagined that we could involve someone of his calibre.  After all, he has collaborated with some of the world’s great singers in both musical theater and opera– Renee Fleming, Dawn Upshaw, Audra MacDonald, Kristin Chenoweth, Lorraine Hunt Lieberson, Frederica Von Stade, Andrea Marcovicci, Harolyn Blackwell, and Betty Buckley, to name a few.  Why would he want to be involved in our modest program?

It was then that I discovered what a generous collaborator and open-hearted artist Ricky is.  Not only did he score his Three by Langston for our singers and players (Dessoff performed that work, as well as two more Langston Hughes settings, in our festival’s opening concert this year), but he spent a long weekend in Lakeville, Connecticut with us.  He was omnipresent, friendly to all and so very encouraging of our young musicians.

In some ways, the seed for this year’s Dessoff festival was planted in my mind that weekend.  I have never seen some for whom words and music are so organically a part of who they are and how they think.  As I discovered in our many conversations that weekend, Ricky is brimming over with a huge range of poems– where some might be said to “burst into song”, Ricky is liable at any minute to “burst into poetry”!

The highlight of the weekend for me was an informal hour that Ricky spent with the students and faculty.  We asked him simply to speak about his life as a musician– as a composer, singer and pianist.  It was a remarkable session.  Ricky is so completely open and revealing of himself as an artist and person, and it was such a distinct pleasure to be present while he regaled us with stories, poetry and songs.

So, as part of WordPlay, I’ve asked Ricky to reprise that masterful ‘performance’ for a New York audience.  His work is well known here; from his musical theater and cabaret style songs to his opera The Grapes of Wrath, New York is Ricky’s milieu, and I know that there will be many of you out there who would love to hear straight from composer himself how some of his beloved pieces began their life.

So please come along to the Abigail Adams Smith Auditorium at 417 E 61st St at 8pm this Thursday night to meet Ricky and hear him speak, recite and sing. [more info]  In the meantime, I’d like to share one of his most famous songs– and the one that first touched me, A Horse With Wings.  Just click on the link below to watch Ricky sing and play it himself.  See you Thursday!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=–shQOCuskQ

One of the most hauntingly beautiful of the Whitman “death poems” is from Drum Taps.  It is at the heart of Vaughan Williams’ Dona Nobis Pacem.  As I said at the Sing-In on Saturday, one reason I am so fascinated with RVW’s setting is that it is a “palimpsest” of sorts—there are architectural layers beneath its more prominent placement in the oratorio.

Whitman, Drum Taps

Although Dona Nobis Pacem was written in 1936, this movement was composed as a free-standing composition in 1914, at the onset of World War I.  For some reason, I happen to be reading a couple different books that discuss WWI at the moment, and I’m especially aware of the idea that many villages sent virtually all of their men—of two generations—off to fight, often belonging to the same fighting unit.  In this way, entire towns lost an unthinkable percentage of their men in the slaughter in the fields of Belgium.  Vaughan Williams was clearly thinking of this as Germany was mobilizing for war in the mid 1930s, and as Mussolini was coming to power in Italy—that the unthinkable might, unthinkably, be repeated.

But there is another archeological layer to this composition: the poem itself.  Whitman released this poem as part of his mighty Drum Taps, written throughout the war and published first in 1865, and then as part of a revised edition of Leaves of Grass (itself first published in 1855) that Whitman produced in 1867.  Like World War I, the American Civil War resulted in extraordinary numbers of casualties, eclipsed in American warfare only by World War II.  And again, so great was the need for soldiers that often two generations were lost, not just young men in their late teens and early twenties.

In this way, Vaughan Williams’ setting of Dirge for Two Veterans is a complex and rich tapestry of grief, encompassing the mourning of three wars and two major artists.  Here is Whitman’s poem:

The last sunbeam
Lightly falls from the finished Sabbath,
On the pavement here, and there beyond it is looking
Down a new-made double grave

Lo, the moon ascending,
Up from the east the silvery round moon,
Beautiful over the house-tops, ghastly, phantom moon,
Immense and silent moon.

I see a sad procession,
And I hear the sound of coming full-key’d bugles,
All the channels of the city streets they’re flooding,
As with voices and with tears.

I hear the great drums pounding,
And the small drums steady whirring,
And every blow of the great convulsive drums,
Strikes me through and through.

For the son is brought with the father,
(In the foremost ranks of the fierce assault they fell,
Two veterans son and father dropt together,
And the double grave awaits them.)

Now nearer blow the bugles,
And the drums strike more convulsive,
And the daylight o’er the pavement quite has faded,
And the strong dead-march enwraps me.

In the eastern sky up-buoying,
The sorrowful vast phantom moves illumin’d,
(‘Tis some mother’s large transparent face,
In heaven brighter growing.)

O strong dead-march you please me!
O moon immense with your silvery face you soothe me!
O my soldiers twain! O my veterans passing to burial!
What I have I also give you.

The moon gives you light,
And the bugles and the drums give you music,
And my heart, O my soldiers, my veterans,
My heart gives you love.

Ralph Vaughan Willams

Many composers have been drawn to this text, most notably RVW and his English compatriot Gustav Holst, who wrote a version of the same text for men’s choir, brass and drums in 1914.  The first clip below is from Vaughan Williams’ Dona Nobis Pacem, conducted by Robert Shaw.  Shaw had a special connection to the poetry of Whitman; it was he who commissioned and premiered one of the great twentieth-century choral works, Hindemith’s setting of When Lilacs Last in Dooryard Bloom’d.  I had the great pleasure of seeing Shaw conduct the work at Yale only a couple years before his death—he was at the height of his powers, fully in command of the sprawling work.  He brings a remarkable sensitivity to the text in this recording of the Dirge for Two Veterans with the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra and Chorus.

Gustav Holst

For comparison, I include here the Holst version.  Some people have suggested that Vaughan Williams set the Dirge in friendly competition with Holst; they are certainly very different works, with RVW’s near-Impressionist colors in contrast to the Holst’s more martial version.  This clip is particularly special to me—speaking of mourning, it is conducted by the late Richard Hickox, whom I met on several occasions in Sydney when he was music director of the Australian Opera.  He was always extremely kind to me, and I was as shocked as the rest of the musical world when he died at a very youthful 60 in November 2008, just as I was moving back to America.  Though he was a strikingly versatile conductor (I especially remember an extraordinary production of Shostakovich’s Lady Macbeth of Mtsesnk that I saw him conduct), he had a special affinity for the English repertoire, as is clear from this recording.

My thanks to the wonderful participants in Saturday’s Sing-in! We had more than 75 people in the room—it was a great crowd on a day that felt particularly appropriate for Robert Frost’s poetry, in the wake of Friday’s lovely snow. We sang through Randall Thompson’s Frostiana, which I wrote about in my last post. We also sang the three movements of Ralph Vaughan Williams’ 1936 Dona Nobis Pacem that set the words of Walt Whitman. Frost and Whitman are two of my favorite poets, so it’s not a surprise that I have a particular fondness for these two choral works.

Walt Whitman

What is it about Walt Whitman’s poetry that seems so—well, so American? There is something so powerful, so muscular, so hopeful about his poetry to me, even in the heart-breaking poems about death in the Civil War. Like the lives of his hero Abraham Lincoln, or Mark Twain or even to a certain extent the great robber barons of the late nineteenth century, Whitman’s words capture the “manifest destiny” feeling of the era, the idea of America as a young adult, shaking off the constraints of its Puritan heritage and forging ahead towards what was seen to be a triumphant future. Even his ubiquitous use of “I” seems ebulliently American—“I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world”… “Do I contradict myself? Very well, then, I contradict myself, I am large, I contain multitudes.”… “I sing the body electric; the armies of those I love engirth me, I engirth them.” It is a shameless, confident, bracing first-person singular, the embodiment of a century that would end with the very nearly self-parodying confidence of Teddy Roosevelt, whose presidency ushered in the “American century.”

Whitman’s poetry all but begs to be set to music: it is full of singing, bells, trumpets and drums, all put to use for the full gamut of human expression, from praise and exultation to bitter mourning. And for all its “American-ness”, English composers have been equally drawn to the universality of Whitman’s poetry. Rather than his ebullience, perhaps the element that has drawn more composers to his poetry is Whitman’s incredible sensitivity to death—a sensitivity that he earned the hard way in his three years at the front lines of the Civil War nursing the wounded and dying. Even in the face of terrible things, Whitman somehow makes death beautiful– a balm or a release. I think in particular of the “Death Carol” from When Lilacs Last in Dooryard Bloom’d, the poem that Whitman wrote following Lincoln’s assassination. We sang a wonderful setting of this text by David Conte two years ago:

Come lovely and soothing death,
Undulate round the world, serenely arriving, arriving,
In the day, in the night, to all, to each,
Sooner or later, delicate death.

Prais’d be the fathomless universe,
For life and joy, and for objects and knowledge curious;
And for love, sweet love — But praise! praise! praise!
For the sure-enwinding arms of cool-enfolding Death.

Few poets capture this almost fatalistic equipoise between the joy of life and the inevitability of death– the “sooner or later” that colors life itself.  This text reminds me of nothing so much as the Lutheran texts that Bach loved so much, especially the haunting Komm, süsser Tod:

Come, sweet death, come blessed rest!
Come lead me to peace
for I am weary of the world,
oh come! I wait for you,
come soon and lead me,
close my eyes.
Come, blessed rest!

In my next post, I’ll write about one of the movements that we read on Saturday from Vaughan Williams’ Dona Nobis Pacem. In the meantime, I thought I’d finish for the time being with a clip that might bring back some memories for those of you who were around in the early 1980s! I was in junior high school when I first heard this song; it was my introduction to Whitman’s poetry.  It turns out that only the first line is his—but the rest of the text by Dean Pitchford certainly captures the out-sized energy and full-throated optimism of Walt Whitman…

Robert Frost stamp, 1974

I’m a Vermonter by birth. Perhaps that accounts for my love of Robert Frost’s poetry—but surely, his words are much more universal than that, because he remains one of America’s most beloved poets. In an age when students are no longer required to memorize great swaths of poetry, his “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” and “The Road Not Taken” are more likely than most poems to be retained in the memory of many readers, at least in part.

In the shadow of a recent presidential inauguration, we are reminded of an earlier ceremony in which Frost had been invited to read a poem written for JFK’s inauguration, “Dedication”. But because of the glare on that brilliant sunny day in the aftermath of a huge snowstorm, Frost was unable to read the faded typewriter print on the page, so he read his more famous poem, “The Gift Outright”.

Frost stood at the crossroads of two poetic traditions: with his use of traditional forms and meters, he belonged in one sense to the nineteenth century into which he was born; but with his down-to-earth, unself-conscious use of colloquial language, he was also a part of the modernist movement that he grew into. His language—accessible and even somehow simple on the surface—hid deeper meanings for those who wished to look for them. But even so, Frost has suffered somewhat by being seen almost as a poetic equivalent of Norman Rockwell, perhaps a little too quaint, a little too old-fashioned.

Randall Thompson

Randall Thompson, a composer who, like Frost was a “flatlander” who was adopted by New England, first as a student at Harvard, and much later as an important professor there, has suffered from the same charges of “old-fashionedness” as Frost. And it’s true: like Frost, Thompson limited himself to (and completely mastered) more traditional forms, with the emphasis on structure, counterpoint and largely diatonic harmonies. And like Frost, his music communicates directly with this listener, and was immensely popular in his lifetime. His Alleluia, written for the opening of Tanglewood in 1940, is one of the few choral works that has remained de rigeur for all choral singers—even in 1968, twenty-eight years after its premiere and in the midst of great social upheaval, it was the best-selling choral work in America.

So it is not surprising that Frostiana, a work that was commissioned by the town of Amherst, Massachusetts to celebrate its bicentennial in 1959, captures those shared characteristics of both Frost and Thompson—an immediate attractiveness, clear communication and unabashed reliance on age-old art forms. It has long been a staple of the choral repertoire. It is not especially difficult, and for generations of choral singers, it has been a wonderful introduction (or re-introduction) to the poetry of Robert Frost.

For me, as I have grown older and moved far from my Vermont childhood in ways both geographical and metaphorical, I find that each time I return to this work, there are new depths, both in Frost’s poetry and Thompson’s music. The surface remains attractive and accessible, but the sentiments are deeper and contain more emotional variants. I think in particular of “The Road Not Taken”. When I first sang it at Montpelier High School, the words were full of teenage vision and pride—that of course I would always choose the nobler path. When I returned to it many years later while living in Sydney, those words proclaimed the wonder of how small steps in one direction could lead to mysterious new, unimagined openings. Now, as I look at these scores in preparation for Saturday’s Sing-In, I am struck more by the line that Thompson uncharacteristically chooses to set twice, setting it apart by rests and slower rhythms: “and that has made all the difference”. I look forward to returning to it in my fifties and beyond to see what Frost’s poetry—and Thompson’s music—highlights for me that time around.

Please come to the Immanuel Lutheran Church, 88th & Lexington Ave this Saturday at 2pm to sing through Frostiana, as well as the three movements from Ralph Vaughan Williams’ Dona Nobis Pacem that set Walt Whitman’s extraordinary poetry.  More information can be found at the Dessoff website.  Maybe this clip of a performance of “The Road Not Taken” will whet your appetite…

Langston Hughes

The Dessoff Choir has always prided itself on being a choir for all of New York, so we perform in venues far and wide throughout the city.  But Tuesday night’s concert is a particularly special occasion for us, because we will be performing a setting of five of Langston Hughes’ poems in the auditorium named for the great Harlem Renaissance poet—at the Schomburg Center, 135^th Street at Malcolm X Blvd, just next to the 2-3 train stop.

Langston Hughes is truly one of America’s great poets: not only did he capture the joys and trials of African-Americans in the period between Reconstruction and the Civil Rights movement, but he also captured the joys of trials of America during that period—and more specifically, New York.

Ricky Ian Gordon

I’ll write more about Ricky Ian Gordon later in this series (he has his own evening coming up on February 7^th—don’t miss it!), but for now, I wanted to introduce you to Five by Langston, which will receive its premiere performance Tuesday night.  Ricky has a particular love of and affinity for Hughes’ poetry, and he has set many of the poet’s texts.  It’s not surprising that Hughes’ poetry would attract a composer who loves poetry: Hughes’ famously jazzy inflections almost demand a musical setting.

In fact, Hughes collaborated with a number of composers, most prominently with Kurt Weill on the operatic musical Street Scene.  He also worked with the composer Jan Meyerwicz, though those works have not remained as central to the repertoire as Street Scene.

 The five choral settings of Hughes’ poems comes from a larger set of twenty-seven settings called Only Heaven.  To whet your appetite, here’s a great clip of the wonderful soprano Harolyn Blackwell—who recorded the full set with Ricky in 1997—singing the playful and cheeky “Joy”.  It’s one of the five songs we’ll be performing tomorrow night.

Harolyn Blackwell sings \”Joy\”

Finally, my favorite Langston Hughes poem, even though it’s not on the concert… but it gives some sense of his depth and the “not yet” time that he lived in.  It seems an appropriate poem to offer as Martin Luther King Day approaches, and as we all work to make Dr King’s– and Langston Hughes’– dream a reality…

I, too, sing America.

I am the darker brother.
They send me to eat in the kitchen
When company comes,
But I laugh,
And eat well,
And grow strong.

Tomorrow,
I'll be at the table
When company comes.
Nobody'll dare
Say to me,
"Eat in the kitchen,"
Then.

Besides,
They'll see how beautiful I am
And be ashamed—

I, too, am America.

Another winter, another Dessoff Midwinter Festival– welcome back!

This year’s festival, WORDPLAY, looks at the marriage of text and music—a relationship that is at the heart of vocal music, but can so often be taken for granted. It all just seems so inevitable… for so many pieces of beloved vocal/choral music, it seems as if the words and music just belong together.

Try telling that to the composer who birthed the piece! Imagine this: at the beginning of the process, they were faced with two sheets of paper—on the left, the poem and on the right, the empty manuscript paper. They had no doubt been mulling over the different ways that they could set their chosen words, and probably even had snippets of melody to go with one line or another, but at that point, the possibilities were endless and there was no inevitability about where they might end up!

In this year’s festival, we are looking at the relationship between words and music through many prisms. We traverse a wide range of genres, and in our final concert we even look at this relationship “backwards”—we take the words of the Pulitzer prize-winning author Geraldine Brooks and create a new “work” by pairing her prose with choral music that reflects and hopefully amplifies the scenes she paints.

To kick things off, I thought I’d introduce you (or re-introduce you) to a couple of pieces from our upcoming opening concert this Tuesday, January 15th. The first clip is a reading of Lord Byron’s incandescent poem “She Walks in Beauty”, followed by two different versions that we’ll present on Tuesday—the first by David Foltz (1952) and the second by New Jersey composer Marty Sedek, nearly fifty years later.

First, a reading of the poem with accompanying text.

Before listening to “our” versions, have a listen to this recording. It turns out that Byron wrote “She Walks in Beauty” at the behest of Isaac Nathan, a Jewish composer in London who eventually emigrated to Australia. I became aware of Nathan when I worked at Sydney Grammar School in Sydney, Australia; Nathan is considered the “father of Australian music”, and his descendents include the late conductor Sir Charles Mackerras and his brother Alastair, who was for many years headmaster at Sydney Grammar. The full set of songs, Hebrew Melodies, was very well-received after its appearance in 1815.

She Walks in Beauty– original version by Isaac Nathan

This recording is by Warren Hayes, tenor and Mary Gerlitz, piano.  Paul Douglass and Frederick Burwick rescued Nathan’s settings from obscurity; you can read more about their project at http://www.sjsu.edu/faculty/douglass/music/album-hebrew.html

As far as Nathan was considered, this must have been the “inevitable” version! But many others have since set this beautiful poem, including the following two settings you can hear on Tuesday night. Enjoy!

Incidentally, the pianist in this recording is Dessoff’s accompanist too! You’ll hear Steven Ryan play this—written with his elegant playing in mind—at the Schomburg Center.