So, I guess the fact that I am posting on this blog means I’m learning some stuff! That’s pretty cool. I’ve started this process exactly how I anticipated: with my nose in a book and, for better or for worse, perpetually irritating my roommate to tell him “just one more really cool thing about e.e. cummings I swear it’s the last one but it’s so interesting.” These first two weeks of the project are, for me, a time to get organized and get up to speed on two things. The first is e.e. cummings himself and how to better understand his writing style, and the second is the recent history of the American art song (though I’ve already drawn up a rough list of the specific songs I will be looking at). The idea is that, once I have a background in where we’ve been musically, I can take what I know of that tradition and combine it with what I’ve come to understand about e.e. cummings’ poetry in terms of visual orthography, thematic content, “ungrammar,” etc. This will let me set up some unifying ways to examine how text interacts with and informs the songs that I’m studying, and, in turn, what that says about the contemporary American art song and composer. Easy as pie, right?

I’ve been focusing on the first of these two broad areas for now, as I managed to immediately get sucked into a book written by Norman Friedman, a literary critic of cummings’ time. He was interested in why people, amateurs and critics alike, seemed to really enjoy and take well to cummings’ poetry, and yet little had been written about him in comparison to other living poets.  I am particularly excited about this book because it was written while cummings was still alive and, thus, is informed partially by direct contact with the poet himself. To be honest, I read the whole thing cover to cover already and am starting to try to come up with ways to connect what I’ve learned to the songs I’ll be studying. Some highlights are to come, somewhat for my own organization as I embark on eight weeks of working with his poetry… but also because I’m a nerd and think this stuff is just really, really cool.

Vision

Cummings created a poetic persona and then very deliberately morphed himself into this persona. He went through war, prison, hunger, etc. but none of that makes it into his poetry regularly, if at all. Rather, his speaker “is completely free of them, busy as he is with songs of joy” (10). His perspective comes from a sort of transcended, enlightened state in which he leaves behind the concerns and anxieties of everyday life in favor of praising without any doubts life’s natural details: nature, love, capacity for growth, and so on.

Cummings, as a man:

(would rather make than have and give than lend

-being through failures born who cannot fail

having no wealth but love,who shall not spend

my fortune(although endlessness should end)

Action

The speaker of lyric poems frequently does one of the following: praise, blame, persuade, react, describe, reflect, or argue. As cummings is not only a poet but a painter, it isn’t particularly surprising that descriptions, reflections, and praises make up the bulk of his work, followed by satires and persuasions (in the sense of, “let me persuade you that you are the most beautiful woman and that you are unique in all the world,” rather than a persuasion as a call to action). “Cummings is most interested in absolute accuracy, and in his effort to be true to the act of perception as it occurs he has developed many of the techniques for which he is so well known” (40).

Voice

I love Friedman’s description of cummings’ neutral voice: “sweet, soft, warm, and moist vocabulary… [whose] physical qualities are fluidity, mellifluousness, and musicality” (63). I think it is his immense capacity for joy and contentedness (especially among the angsty or troubled poems we frequently read among the classics), combined with his amazingly melodic writing, which made me love his poetry in the first place. Cummings also uses a conglomeration of vocabularies. He has this “neutral” voice, and then pulls from extremes of formal or archaic vocabularies and burlesque or vulgar ones. These deviations are largely a product of his propensity for praise and satire respectively.

So, I’ve raised a lot of questions in reading this book, and I do feel more ready to tackle some of the texts I’ll be working with. I’m also realizing, though, that just because I’ve got all of this new knowledge about cummings informing my interpretations, doesn’t mean that the composers who set these texts do. This isn’t to say that I am accusing them of being ill-informed about the poetry, but ultimately what they see or hear in the poems does not necessarily have anything to do with the context of these poems themselves. Perhaps a composer is inspired just by the melodies in the word choice, or the descriptions of springtime.

Ultimately, I’m studying the music. This music, though, is a product of a collaboration between the texts of e.e. cummings and contemporary American composers, not the poems themselves. So, I’ve been working on separating what I’ve learned into categories: interesting facts that help me to analyze the poetry on a deeper level (which are important but not always relevant), and equally interesting facts which allow me to create categories and look for commonalities among the texts which composers select. For example: do they mainly pick poems of praise because of their descriptive qualities, or are the “actions” of poems set to music often varied? Do composers tend to shy away from or gravitate towards certain types of visual representations in their poems? Are there certain words or themes which are repeated among multiple composers’ works, and if so, are they set similarly or differently?

Up next for me, I’m beginning the first of three volumes of Ruth Friedberg’s “American Art Song and American Poetry,” which should hopefully give me some context regarding the trajectory and traditions of American song. I’ve already dived into the chapter on text setting in the early part of the 20^th century, and let me just say, it is awesome.

Until next time!

Véronique

Hi! I’m Véronique, a rising senior in the Bienen School of Music, where I study Voice and Opera as my primary major and am also pursuing a second, self-designed major which explores the language and poetry of music. Welcome to my research blog!

Singers are uniquely able among musicians to directly communicate text to an audience. As such, I’m hopelessly interested in how language informs the music of a particular composer, age, or culture. This summer, I am lucky enough to be researching exactly that. In our two year music theory track at Northwestern, music majors spend a significant amount of time studying art song and song cycles of German composers (known as “lieder”) largely in relation to their texts by the famous German poets: Goethe, Mörike, Eichendorff, and so on. French chanson is approached the same way; we frequently examine it in relation to the texts of famous poets like Verlaine. In art song, a genre of classical music traditionally setting a poem to music for voice and piano, the words and the music perpetually inform one another.

Goethe and Verlaine are unique voices of their respective times and cultures. The composers and songs which set them are the same. But as a lover of contemporary music, I was disappointed to find, as I explored the music library and searched through the back alleys and uncharted territories of NuCat, that the few books which discuss “contemporary” American song are largely published in the first half of the 20th century. Art songs are being composed all the time; why is it so difficult to find information about the styles and performance practices of the contemporary American song? In thinking back to my theory classes, studying art songs as both poetry and music, I decided to select an accessible and avant-garde (and, of course, uniquely American) poet, e.e. cummings, and to use his texts to examine the ways in which American art song composers unite his melodic but visually avant-garde poems to classical music.

Can these compositions aid us in better understanding and performing the contemporary style of American art song? Over the course of 8 weeks, I’ll be delving into the works of one poet and approximately 10 composers in order to examine a sample of uniquely American works in an attempt to understand just that.