Music Comments:
to be filled in by composer in early 99.
Text Comments:
Beginning of text: "I'm going to New York! (what a lark! what a song!) where the tough Rocky's eaves hit the sea. Where th'Acropolis is functional, the trains that run and shout! The books that have trousers and sleeves! I'm going to New York! (quel voyage! jamais plus!) far from Ypsilanti and Flint!" [more]
Recordings:
by Paul Sperry and Irma Vallecillo.
This entry contributed by G&K around 11/28/98. The contributor(s) looked over the song.
Music Comments:
20'. Premiered by Bethany Beardslee at Woodrow Wilson Hall (Princeton) 2/57. This, the composer's opus one, is a powerful yet lyrical setting of five of John Donne's Holy Sonnets: XIV "Batter my heart, three person'd God", XI "Spit in my face you Jews,", IV "Oh, my black Soul!", XIII What if this present were the world's last night?", and VII " At the round earth's imagined corners,". It has been performed by sopranos as diverse as lyric Bethany Beardslee and dramatic Magda Lazlo, always with telling effect. Among other singers who have performed it are Janice Harsanyi, Nelda Nelson and Olivia Stapp. This cycle predates the later immersion of the composer in microtonal materials; it is written in the regular equal tempered scale. It is moderately difficult for both singer and pianist.
This entry contributed by John Eaton around 3/20/99. The contributor(s) composed the song.
Music Comments:
alternate low note brings lowest note in song to B3. Allegro non troppo, quarter = 96-100. Begins with fast right hand piano (largely sixteenth subdivisions), beneath lyrical voice line. Moves to both hand arpeggiation as vocal rhythm lengthens. Ends sostenuto with triplet eigth subdivision in piano, then dying away.
Text Comments:
Sing me at dawn but only with your laugh: Like sprightly Spring that laugheth into leaf; Like Love, that cannot flute for smiling at Life. Sing me at dawn...Sing to me only with your speech all day, As voluble leaflets do. Let viols die. The least word of your lips is melody. Sing me at dusk, but only with your sigh; Like lifting seas it solaceth: breathe so, All voicelessly, the sense that no songs say. Sing me at midnight with your murmurous heart; And let its moaning like a chord be heard Surging, surging through you and sobbing unsubdued.
This entry contributed by anonymous around 9/16/99. The contributor(s) looked over the song.
treble clef, E3 - D#6 (original key), medium high tessitura, 1 voice and Piano (played by two pianists directly on the strings with fourteen different materials), electronic sound synthesizer (or tape available) [GET IT!]
Music Comments:
14'. Premiered at the American Academy in Rome; Miciko Hirayama, Soprano 4/65
Was the First Work to Use Live Performance on a Modern Electronic Sound Synthesizer
This cycle, written in memoriam of the composer's teacher and friend Richard Palmer Blackmur, is in three parts: a very evocative setting based on the images of Hart Crane's Repose of Rivers, Blackmur's [R. P. Blackmur, American, 1904-1965] Mirage and Crane's The Return. In addition to the fact that it was the first piece to use live performance on a modern sound synthesizer, Songs for R.P.B. explores the use of quarter tones and the exact microtonal intervals and precise timbres available from playing directly on the strings of the piano in many ways with various materials.
Recordings:
Recorded on American Decca DL-710154
This entry contributed by John Eaton around 3/20/99. The contributor(s) composed the song.
Music Comments:
Premiered by the Indiana University New Music Ensemble; Harvey Sollberger, Conductor, Nelda Nelson, Soloist 3/12/87
Text Comments:
From Chamber Music: X X X V I
I hear an army charging upon the land,
And the Thunder of horses plunging, foam about their knees:
Arrogant, in black armour, behind them stand,
Disdaining the reins, with fluttering whips, the charioteers.
They cry unto the night their battle name:
I moan in sleep when I hear afar their whirling laughter.
My heart, have you no wisdom thus to despair?
My love, my love, my love, why have you left me alone?
X X X V
All day I hear the noise of waters
Making moan,
Sad as a sea-bird is, when going
Forth alone.
He hears the winds' cry to the water's
Monotone.
The grey winds, the cold winds are blowing
Where I go.
I hear the noise of many waters
Far below.
All day, all night, I hear them flowing
To and fro.
From Pomes Penyeach : A P R A Y E R
Again!
Come, give, yield all your strength to me!
From far a low word breathes on the breaking brain
Its cruel calm, submission's misery,
Gentling her awe as to a soul predestined.
Cease, silent love! My doom!
Blind me with your dark nearness, O have mercy, beloved enemy of my will!
I dare not withstand the cold touch that I dread.
Draw from me still
My slow life! Bend deeper on me, threatening head,
Proud by my downfall, remembering, pitying
Him who is, him who was!
Again!
Together, folded by the night, they lay on earth. I hear
From far her low word breathe on my breaking brain.
Come! I yield. Bend deeper upon me! I am here.
Subduer do not leave me! Only joy, only anguish,
Take me, save me, soothe me, O spare me!
She Weeps Over Rahoon
Rain on Rahoon falls softly, softly falling,
Where my dark lover lies.
Sad is his voice that calls me, sadly calling,
At grey moonrise.
Love, hear thou
How soft, how sad his voice is ever calling,
Ever unanswered, and the dark rain falling,
Then as now.
Dark too our hearts, O love, shall lie and cold
As his sad heart has lain
Under the moongrey nettles, the black mould
And muttering rain.
Ecce Puer
Of the dark past
A child is born;
With joy and grief
My heart is torn.
Calm in his cradle
The living lies.
May love and mercy
Unclose his eyes!
Young life is breathed
On the glass;
The world that was not
Comes to pass.
A child is sleeping:
An old man gone.
O, father forsaken,
Forgive your son.
This entry contributed by John Eaton around 3/20/99. The contributor(s) composed the song.
Music Comments:
"Flowing calmly." fff A5 as the nightingale presses the thorn to her heart. Tonality shifts frequently. Small piano postlude closes the song and cycle.
Text Comments:
Loving the idea of love, a nightingale pressed her chest to the thorn of a rosebush so a rose might bloom as red as her blood. The harder she pressed, the sweeter she sang until in the purest ecstasy of song, her heart and the thorn of the rosebush met. A man picked the rose for a woman he loved, but the woman disdained it. The man discarded the rose near the wheels of a cart. He went back to his books. He forgot about love with a valid excuse. Love, let us be neither the man nor the woman but the nightingale: the sharper the pain the greater the song, the deeper the red the miraculous blossom.
Music Comments:
12'. Premiered Mar. 8, 1998 by Nelda Nelson and the composer at La Decima Musa, Chicago.
The 17th century Mexican poet, Sor Juana Inès de la Cruz, is commonly considered one of the great poets of Latin America. Sor Juana was a brilliant and charming intellectual, whose cultural soirÈes at her convent were characterized by their profundity and high spirit until the Inquisition and the intolerance of the times, especially to women, drove her away from her literary pursuits and eventually to her death. After the departure and death of her protector and lover(?), the wife of a viceroy of New Spain, envious churchmen set upon her, unrestrained.
Three of her sonnets have been set:
The first describes Sor Juana's love as a phantasmal image which seems always to elude her until the final sestet, at the conclusion of which Sor Juana says that her fantasy holds the image captive. Instructing the singer to sing into the strings of the piano as well as using the middle pedal of the piano to catch "fleeting images" of specific sonorities are techniques used to capture the meaning of the poem.
The second sonnet is perhaps the most significant of them all in terms of Sor Juana's life, it is almost a brief spiritual autobiography. As she has said in her own words: "My life was a long search in the dark for knowledge. I tried every path, every method ..." Imagine the courage and strength of will for a woman, a nun, to undertake this in 17th century New Spain! (And she eventually did pay the price.) Like Phaeton, a favorite mythological figure of her poetry, she eventually accepts the challenge, despite its dangers, of seeking truth rather than acquiescing in an easy life. In the octet, the piano evokes the sea, charging bulls, and wild horses. In the sestet it uses a riding rhythm to lead up to Sor Juana's momentous decision.
The third sonnet is a very moving expression of the absence and death of a loved one based on the myth of Pyramus and Thisbe: After a long time of communicating only through a wall, the two lovers agree to meet in a field. Thisbe gets there before Pyramus and leaves a garment. A lion, which has just killed a beast, picks the cloth up in its mouth. Pyramus, thinking Thisbe has been killed by the lion, kills himself; Thisbe, when she sees Pyramus dead, runs herself through as well. Alas, no such relief is Sor Juana's! Singing inside the piano is again used as Pyramis calls futilely for Thisbe. Meanwhile the pianist plays funereal chords to express the grief of Sor Juana at her friend's death.
Text Comments:
translation: Semblance of my illusive love, hold still -- image of a bewitchment fondly cherished, lovely fiction that robs my heart of
joy, fair mirage that makes it joy to perish. Since already my breast, like willing iron, yields to the
powerful magnet of your charms, why must you so flatteringly
allure me, then slip away and cheat my eager arms? Even so, you shan't boast, self-satisfied, that your tyranny has triumphed over me, evade as you will arms opening wide, all but encircling your fantasmal form: in vain shall you elude my fruitless clasp, for fantasy holds you captive in its grasp. If men weighed the hazards of the sea,
none would embark. If they foresaw
the dangers of the ring, rather than taunt
the savage bull, they'd cautiously withdraw. If the horseman should prudently reflect on the headlong fury
of the steed's wild dash, he'd never undertake to rein him in adroitly,
or to wield the cracking lash. But, were there one of such temerity that, facing undoubted
peril, he still planned to drive the fiery chariot and subdue the
steeds of Apollo himself with daring hand, he'd stop at nothing,
would not meekly choose a way of life binding a whole life through.
A dismal mulberry tree's black shade where shadowy
dreads stir dolefully and in whose hollow trunk there still resounds
an echo calling Thisbe soulfully, covered the dappled greensward of a lawn where amorous Pyramus pierced his breast and bled away, and Thisbe showed
her grief by an act with which the world is still impressed. But seeing Love behave so atrociously, Death pitied them and bound their chests in one tight knot together dotingly. Oh, surely a
fate far more to be deplored is that poor woman who can't bind her
breast to Pyramus's own with so much as a sword!
