ON WRITING A SONG CYCLE
American composer Kenneth LaFave shares his thoughts on the creative processes which led to his latest composition for voice and piano - "Before an Immense Sky." The cycle - both commissioned and performed by tenor Philip Eve - will receive its World Premiere on Friday, 26th March 2004, at Leighton House, Kensington.
Song is the most intimate of vocal arts. Sacred choral music is inherently transpersonal, music written for masses of singers in praise of the eternal. Opera is inescapably public, written for stage personae to proclaim in vast theatres. But song - the setting of a pre-written text for (in most cases) solo voice and piano - puts it on the line, as we Americans (and, for all I know, you English) say. A song proclaims, "I chose this text and decided to inflect it musically in this manner, because I have something to say through it." You can hide behind character in an opera or universal sentiment in a choral work. In a song, you are naked.
I first understood this in 1984, when I attended a song-writing workshop in Florida with Ned Rorem, widely considered my country's finest living song composer. Ned's method was to hand out a poem to the six of us young composers on an afternoon, and ask each of us to deliver a song on it the next morning. Evenings found Ned's students cloistered in our rooms, shunning the beauty of the dolphins arcing through the lagoon outside our building, puzzling out how to set a bit of Tennyson or Whitman so that it fell just so on a melodic line. One afternoon, Ned gave us a brief poem by the obscure American writer Witter Bynner. The first lines went: "He never knew what was the matter with him/Until one night/He chopped up his bed for firewood/It was comfortable that way." Now, just what, musically speaking, can you do with that?
What I did was to give the words a ragtime tune. The jaggedness of the rhythms and the nonsense of the image seemed to demand it. Proudly, I walked into class the next day with my raggy song, certain it would be clear to Ned and to all my fellow students that this was the one way to set such an impossible poem to music. Ned's method was to put each student's song on the piano rack, and to sight-sing and -play it straight through. Afterward, he would go over the manuscript, pointing with unerring perception to this measure and that, saying, "This is strong, that is weak, this would be better," etc. As Ned sang each student's attempt to lyricise Bynner's unlyrical text, it became clear that my spoofy ragtime setting was indeed a legitimate take on the assigned poem. But so was composer X's wistful waltz version of the same poem, and composer Y's sad, slow meditation. There was a sort of fugal treatment from one composer, and a declamatory, pseudo-dramatic setting from another. Among six settings of the same poem, no two were anywhere near alike. Each composer had heard distinctly different, sharply contrasting things and dealt with them accordingly.
It was more than mere difference of style: it constituted completely different personal views of the poem. Six different settings of Kyrie eleison might have elicited a range of styles, from Stravinskian to Minimalist, but would have had in common the central feeling of the words' meaning. The Bynner text produced six wholly individual works of art, leading to Ned's lesson-moral of the day: "A song is a reading of the poem."
Fast forward to 2003. London tenor Philip Eve has become the globe's most ardent champion and subtlest interpreter of my song cycle based on a group of Witter Bynner poems, including the one set that day in Florida. We have met through a mutual friend in Phoenix, Arizona -- where I now write music criticism for The Arizona Republic -- and maintained a transatlantic communication. While I have heard Philip only on recordings, I can tell that, via the alchemy of performance, he has turned my Bynner songs from a nonsense bouquet into an artful statement of longing, loneliness and madness. That, I assume, is and shall be the extent of our artistic relationship.
Then, one day last spring, an e-mail arrived from Philip, asking if I'd be interested in setting a certain poem by e.e.cummings; something about the Bynner songs has suggested to him the idea that I might clothe these very different words in music appropriate to them. Eagerly, knowing Philip's artistry, I accepted the assignment. Having agreed, I thereupon examined the poem: No set rhythm dominated its undulating lines. No rhyme scheme helped delineate one section from another. I would have to impose structure, making executive decisions about prosody as I proceeded.
Some songs take time, others find their way quickly. This one threatened to involve weeks of work, until I realized that the sheer enthusiasm of the lover's voice in the poem required a constant shift of key. This gave me a starting place and speeded things up. For instance, the opening lines, which follow, were for me utterly wild in their imagery and mood: "i carry your heart with me/i carry it in my heart/i am never without it/anywhere i go you go, my dear/and whatever is done by only me/is your doing my darling." The musical setting I crafted as their counterpart scoots from four flats to two sharps to one flat - all within the dizzying space of 13 measures.
Philip received and sang my chromatic little song with grace, then asked for more - something a composer always likes to hear. Would I be interested in setting four additional poems, making a cycle of five? These five, mind you, were not an arbitrary assemblage: They had been read at the partnership ceremony bonding Philip and the love of his life.
Now, a song cycle, to once more paraphrase Ned Rorem, is any set of two or more songs gathered together for any reason stated by the composer. The set might share a common poet or a common theme. What better reason to bring five poems together than by their association with the lives of two people in the bond of love? At the same time, what is more challenging - nay, intimidating -- than to write music that reflects another person's love life? All one can do is write music reflecting one's subjective experience of love, and hope it has resonance for others. The remaining texts were disparate in style: Philip supplied another cummings, plus poems by Rossetti, Michelangelo and Hardy. Their common thread: an ecstatic state of mind, prompted by the presence of romantic love.
I am now (5 January, 2004) in the midst of completing this song cycle, which bears the name, "Before an Immense Sky". The second cummings poem has sparked me to write music equally restless. But where the first song relied upon shifting keys, this one rode a tide of constantly changing, odd meters - five and seven, especially. The Rossetti, called "Silent Noon," seemed to cry out for a dissonant accompaniment, cradling a gentle melody; I answered the call, praying all the while to Euterpe, muse of lyric poetry, that my music not offend the poet's intent. This dichotomy is a constant for all honest song composers: a feeling of duty to the poet, mixed with the desire to ransack his catalogue.
That is where Philip and I are at present. On 26th March this year at Leighton House, Philip will reprise his performance of the Bynner cycle, and will premiere the new cycle of commissioned love songs. Will the new cycle do justice to the poems? Will the audience hear love as I have heard it? I intend to be there to find out.