Hi! It’s been a while, I know. I’ve been finishing up that entire three-volume set of “American Art Song and American Poetry” while I waited for some of my most important scores to arrive from Canada, Iowa, and who knows where else. Luckily, two of the four song cycles that I’m planning to examine have now arrived (thanks, InterLibrary Loan!), which means that I finally get to do hands-on work with the music itself! I’ve been so excited to get started, and though it’s difficult, it’s challenging me to think about music in new ways, and I’m having way more fun than you’d think is allowed for a research grant.
I’m starting off my research with Ricky Ian Gordon’s set of five songs for high voice, “and flowers pick themselves.” I’m working with the piano-vocal score, but in actuality, it has also been orchestrated and those parts are only available by rental. I have yet to decide if I should take into consideration those orchestral parts- on the one hand, an art song is traditionally just voice and piano, but on the other hand, two of the four sets of songs have been orchestrated, and it might provide some new ways to learn what colors and effects the composer was searching for in his or her writing. We shall see! It may also come down to the fact that, if I can’t track down a place to borrow the parts for free, I unfortunately do not have the budget to rent an entire orchestra’s worth of part books… nor do I have an orchestra, for that matter.
“and flowers pick themselves” is a set, according to the composer, about loneliness. In his program notes for the only recorded version of these songs, he writes that he selected the texts in order to create a journey in which the audience experiences community and loneliness, centering around cummings’s famous “anyone lived in a pretty how town.” The set contains, in order, these five texts: “i thank You God for most this amazing,” “why did you go,” “Thy fingers make early flowers of,” “anyone lived in a pretty how town,” and finally “who knows if the moon’s a balloon.” This final song is the only one I’ve ever sung, and it was one of the songs which grabbed my attention and eventually led me to propose this project. It remains one of my favorite American art songs to date. However, working with this music is slow going, and I’ve only done a descriptive analysis of the first two songs so far and am now beginning the third.
Here’s an example of what just a few measures of my scores look like (I’d put more, but I don’t want to upset anyone re: copyright) as I go through and annotate for things like tonal center, form, text setting devices, stressed/unstressed syllables in the text, color, etc:
I’ve also been recording some of my friends who are involved in public speaking (thanks, Tour Guides!) and theatre (thanks, cast of Pirates of Penzance!) reading these poems aloud and comparing them with the rhythmic and melodic contours of the texts in the songs. This has led to finding and notating some consistencies and some interesting changes between the two. I also have found some old recordings of cummings himself reciting some of the poetry, including “i thank You God for most this,” which has been amazing to listen to as well as to compare to the text settings in the songs.
In general, my big struggle thus far has been in tracking tonal areas in the music. While I’m good at searching for the relationships directly between melody, rhythm, and text, it’s a cool challenge for me to navigate the harmonic language of this kind of music, and I’m learning a lot from it. Ricky Ian Gordon is famous for believing that emotion is more use in writing music than just sticking to the rules of music theory, and this combined with the contemporary music scene leads to a lot of inexplicable sonorities. I’ve quickly realized that Roman Numeral analysis won’t help me with this composer, and have settled for using motifs and important notes to derive the key center. Some pieces will be more easily traced than others: for example, “why did you go” is a passacaglia, and while the harmonic language eventually is clouded with altered tones, because of the repeated melodic material and bass line, it is possible to see Gordon’s progression from G to Ab in terms of key area and then watch as he distorts it and alters the tonalities and melodic lines as the piece goes on and the narrator’s loneliness and worry increase. His piano postlude, reminiscent of German lied in style, carries the emotion beyond the text for another minute of music. I think that being flexible and realizing that this contemporary music cannot all fit into one model of analysis is key in working on this research project, and in the past few days I’ve started to figure out where to look in each score for the information I need!
Have a great day!
Véronique