My brilliant plan of naming all these blog posts after the poems that I’m working with is significantly less simple than I had anticipated. Thanks, e.e. cummings, for your ungrammar and perpetual use of enjambment.
Anyway. This week has been quite productive in terms of song analysis! It started off slowly, but now I think I’m hitting my stride and learning what to look for and how to make the process unique to each song and its musical integrity but also in order to standardize the sorts of descriptions and conclusions I draw. I have finished with Ricky Ian Gordon’s “and flowers pick themselves” as of two days ago. (Highlights include realizing that the second song is a slowly deteriorating passacaglia, scrapping Roman Numeral analysis in favor of searching for predominant-dominant-tonic relationships which was much more effective, identifying Gordon’s love of major-major sevenths, and getting to the final song in the set, which is one of my favorite English songs I’ve ever sung.) I’m now onto Dominick Argento’s “Songs About Spring,” which is exactly what it sounds like: five songs set to cummings texts, all of which are about spring. Go figure. What’s been fun is that the first song in this set and the final song in Gordon’s set are the same text, “who knows if the moon’s,” and it’s been really interesting to compare how different these two men’s interpretations of the poem really are.
This switch in composer has made some things easier and other things a lot harder. I was just getting used to Ricky Ian Gordon’s harmonic language: for example, his tendency to use certain modes (I see you, mixolydian), his altered tones, his sequential motifs, and his favorite sonorities. Dominick Argento is a different beast entirely. He wavers perpetually in between tonality, atonality, and even the occasional tone row. His songs are frequently shorter and denser and are often times are more difficult for me to navigate harmonically as a result, but he’s also really interesting and, in terms of compositional technique, much better documented, especially for his choral and operatic music. I’m still wading into his music and figuring out how to approach it, as is likely going to be the case for every composer I’ll be studying. But oh my goodness, things I discovered today: he was only 23 and still in school when he wrote this set. Twenty-three! I hope I’m as cool as he was in three years when I’m the same age. He also wrote the set for his wife, Carolyn Bailey, who was a soprano and, according to him, his muse and partner in crime when writing for the voice.
There’s actually a recording of this music, too, which is amazing! Better yet, a former Northwestern professor is the pianist on the CD, and I was lucky enough to take a class with her before she stopped teaching it: collaborative piano. This was all about the relationship between singer and pianist and, in turn, vocal and piano parts in music. I am planning on reaching out to her to ask about her experience with the music, since I’m hoping she will have plenty of interesting thoughts about the way the different musical elements interact. I’d just love to know what process she used when preparing and studying the set!
Talk to you soon!
Véronique