Music Comments:
"Presto ed inquieto" dotted quarter = 126. Tricky rhythmically. Hangs largely in the lower half of the song's range, except around high F#5 (high tessitura there). One F#5 held, diminuendo from ff to pp. Piano part often staccato, marcato. Somewhat angular but lyrical.
Text Comments:
Beginning of text: "Why is life so tragic; why, why, why, why? So like a little strip of pavement over an abyss. I look down; I feel giddy; why, why, why, why? I wonder how I am ever to walk to the end. But why do I feel this: Now that I say it I don't feel it." More--she is happy except for anxiety. Ends again with "Why, why, why?"
Recordings:
4 recordings at Amazon.com. The one linked below is a special order at Amazon (there are two that are available for almost immediate shipping) but the one below is Janet Baker's recording and includes some RealAudio clips you can hear over the net.
Music Comments:
Initial marking: Senza tempo: quasi improvisato. Avec une finesse précieuse et recherchée. Très lent. 2 pages, approximately 2 min.
See http://www.music.mcgill.ca/~schulman/sorabji.html
Music Comments:
15'. A Setting of Three Poems (in Four Sections) by William Butler Yeats Premiered by the Chicago Contemporary Chamber Players, Clifford Colnot, Conductor, Nelda Nelson, Soloist 1/17/86.
The song cycle, Ars Poetica, (1985), is based upon three poems from Last Poems of William Butler Yeats. The first two of these, and part of the third, are "...descants/ Upon the supreme theme of Art and Song."
The first poem set, To Dorothy Wellesley, is advice given by Yeats to a poet he loved and admired. First: "Stretch towards the moonless midnight of the trees." Then he tells her to "...climb to your chamber full of books and wait," -- is this the "technique of patience" advised by Henry James? Finally, "What climbs the stair?" "Neither Content/ Nor satisfied Conscience, but...The proud furies, each with their torch on high." In other words, Yeats felt that passion in poetry could only be the result of depressed violence or madness -- i.e.., the action of the furies. I have tried to fill the beginning of this song with dimly seen (=heard) gossamer threads in open, "patient" space. But as we move along, through the buzzing caused by a harp pedal being in half position, there is a foreboding of the furies. These "rasps", augmented by scratchy bowing by the violoncello and fluttertonguing by the flute, increase in number and intensity from this point to the end of the song, as the furies approach to prod the poet into the terrible but joyous ecstasy of creation.
The second poem, That Strange Girl , presents Yeats's visualization of a poet possessed by the furies, maddened by them. The young Irish actress and poet, Margot Ruddick, is the dancer and singer of this poem; and, the events described in it actually happened. Yeats found in her poetry a "...power of expression of spiritual suffering unique in our generation." Twenty-seven to Yeats's sixty-nine when their affair began, she eventually left family and work to rush to Yeats in Majorca, saying she must die if she did not write a poem that would live. When Yeats told her she must work on each of her poems until it is perfect, she went out to die by the sea, but found so much in life that she loved that she danced instead on the rocks. Later, in Barcelona where she had fled, she jumped from a room in which, in her madness, she had been confined by her friends, broke her kneecap, and hid from the guardia in the hold of a ship. Here she sang to the sailors a poem beginning with "Sea-starved, hungry sea." Our singer both impersonates Margot Ruddick's improvisations, and, in another kind of voice, relates her story. The accompaniment is partially based on our aural version of her wild extemporizing, initiated by the furies.
The third song of the cycle begins with Yeats at his most magisterial. ( I will always remember Auden's objections to "Senator Yeats's voice"; nevertheless, these are the verses, the lilt of which he (Auden) copied for a section of his eulogy for Yeats upon the latter's death.: "Earth receive an honored guest...") The tone of the fourth part of Under Ben Bulben, which starts with "Irish poets, learn your trade," is so jaunty and deliberately anti-modern, that I thought it appropriate to incorporate at this point in the cycle an early setting of these verses, written in my 17th year in quite a different musical language. I 'haunt' this early song with a quarter tone outside of the diatonic-chromatic system in which it was composed. These microtonal 'visitations' eventually cumulate in the last section of the cycle, a setting, with keening, of the last part of Under Ben Bulben, which announces Yeats's epitaph. Thus, the last section of our cycle makes an ironic comment on the simple self assurance of the third song, and returns at its very end to the admonition to "stretch", even though that action encompasses our death.
Text Comments: To Dorothy Wellesley
Stretch towards the moonless midnight of the trees As though that hand could reach to where they stand And they but famous old uphosteries Delightful to the touch; tighten that hand As though to draw them closer yet. Rammed full Of that most sensuous silence of the night (For since the horizon's bought strange dogs are still.) Climb to your chamber full of books and wait, No books upon the knee, and no one there But a great Dane who cannot bay the moon And now lies sunk in sleep. What climbs the stair? Nothing that common women ponder on If you are worth my hope! Neither Content Nor satisfied Conscience, but that great family Some ancient famous authors misrepresent, The Proud Furies each with her torch on high.
A Crazed Girl That crazed girl improvising her music, Her poetry, dancing upon the shore, Her soul in division from itself Climbing, falling she knew not where, Hiding amid the cargo of a steamship, Her knee-cap broken, that girl I declare A beautiful lofty thing, or a thing Heroically lost, heroically found. No matter what disaster occurred She stood in desperate music wound, Wound, wound, and she made in her triumph Where the bales and the baskets lay No common intelligible sound But sang, O sea-starved, hungry sea.'
Under Ben Bulben: IV Irish poets, learn your trade, Sing whatever is well made, Scorn the sort now growing up All out of shape from toe to top, Their unremembering hearts and heads Base-born products of base beds. Sing the peasantry, and then Hard-riding country gentlemen, The holiness of monks, and after Porter-drinkers' randy laughter; Sing the lords and ladies gay That were beaten into the clay Through seven heroic centuries; Cast your mind on other days That we in coming days may be Still the indomitable Irishry.
Under Ben Bulben:V Under bare Ben Bulben's head In Drumcliff churchyard Yeats is laid. An ancestor was rector there Long years ago, a church stands near, By the road an ancient cross. No marble, no conventional phrase; On limestone quarried near the spot By his command these words are cut: Cast a cold eye On life, on death Horseman, pass by!
Recordings:
Indiana Univ. Press C.D., Music by John Eaton
This entry contributed by John Eaton around 3/20/99. The contributor(s) composed the song.
Music Comments:
A well written melody and an interesting piano part. Andante maestoso. a rather short song. As I marked in the tessitura section above, it seems to me this song hangs high. Majestic, as both "maestoso" and the text would suggest.
Text Comments:
Full text: As if the sea should part And show a further sea And that a further, and the three But a presumption be of periods of seas Unvisited of shores Themselves the verge of seas to be-Eternity is these.
This entry contributed by G&K around 11/10/98. The contributor(s) looked over the song.
Music Comments:
(3:12)
Quasi-romantic and transcendental, long lines call for excellent breath
control, big climax, difficult for both singer and pianist but very
moving
Text Comments:
Full text: "At last, At last to be identified! At last, At last the lamps upon thy side the rest of Life to see! Past, past Midnight! Past the Morning, Morning star! Past sunrise! What leagues there are Between our feet, our feet and Day! At last!"
Recordings:
Jennifer Casey Cabot has recorded the entire cycle for demo purposes.
This entry contributed by Richard Pearson Thomas around 10/26/98. The contributor(s) composed the song.
