OK, I told you this is my summer plan: fewer readers, fewer listeners, and some of the posts are going to get weirder and deal with specialized topics that diverge from the usual stuff I write about here. Let’s start today with some personal history, something I worry about running on too long about, but I’ll try to keep it brief:

I have no formal musical training, and I even hesitate to call myself “self-taught,” as to me that infers that I have self-studied music and could demonstrate some organized mastery of it. One of my inspirations, Frank Zappa, for example, liked to recommend “Go to library, find some books, and learn how to compose.”* This is not the way complex, particularly orchestral, composition has traditionally been taught, but it made sense to me. I tried it. It didn’t stick. Though when younger, I made an effort for a couple of years to learn basics of theory and notation, but as soon as things got to examples I started to play with those examples which distracted my orderly hierarchical learning. This still happens: I’ll read some deconstruction of a musical piece, or I’ll come upon an explanation of a musical technique, and I’ll drop studying it and go off and try to use it for my own purposes.

In summary, I learned to compose music largely by playing with music. Complex or orchestral music has few examples of composers who learned in the absence of ordered instruction, but there are more examples of vernacular and popular music musicians who learned this way. Many/most of those musician/composers are effective musicians in the style they are composing in – and if large ensemble works are rarer, otherwise the complexity and sophistication of music by such composers is not necessarily limited. And now here’s the next limitation I have use ingenuity to deal with: I honestly don’t think I’m a competent musician. I’m an inconsistent guitarist with some ideas and techniques I can execute on good days. I started as a terrible singer and with improvement I hope my rough-hewn singing can rise to the level of eccentric stylist.

But – even as a child I had an appreciation for “classical music” – that highbrow stuff made with educations and exacting training. In 1960 or 61 I got an Airline transistor radio: one of those little chrome-plated trim plastic boxes a little larger and thicker than a cigarette pack that otherwise might occupy a mid-century pocket. This was in the interregnum between Rock’n’Roll’s emergent artists and the Beatles, and I listened largely to WOI-AM. Run out of a university, it could claim to be one of the first American “public radio” stations, and one that broadcast large blocks of classical music. Around this time, the wife of our little town’s public school superintendent tried to teach my classmates, farm kids, about orchestral music, and they wanted nothing to do with her seriousness about it. The besieged teacher appreciated my appreciation and likely strained herself tolerating my off-key signing in her school choir. I liked the pieces she played the class off records, often remembering them as snippets of the same pieces that were played as underscore in animated cartoons on TV. Any underground, prog rock, punk, indie, goth, etc kid from younger generations may appreciate: my peers not digging the Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms stuff was part of the attraction.

Then for two years I went to college, at a small school south of Des Moines, which, oddly enough had an ambitious opera program. Eventually the director behind this would have a nice, newly-build concert hall for his productions, but back then it was a tiny college theater or the flat-floor hall over the top of the college lunchroom. There I had the experience of hearing my classmates, kids my age, along with a few imported “ringers,” singing the classical repertoire, sometimes less than 10 yards away. This is human music, made by creatures like myself, even if I wasn’t – and wouldn’t be – able to duplicate their sound.

I promised you weird. Have I delivered? I at this point didn’t play any instrument, but I was enamored of and writing poetry. Somewhere around then I was introduced to art song.**

The same Willa Cather poem as our last Parlando episode has been set by two modern composers working in the classical tradition. This one is by William Bolcom, a composer whose breadth and aims I admire, even if I don’t think this works particularly well.

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If I was to describe the Parlando Project it would sound like a definition of art song: “Literary poetry (generally not intended for musical performance when written) set to music by a composer who normally is not the adapted lyricist. From what I can see, art song pieces tend to be “audition” or “resume” pieces for classical music singers. Many are written to be sung with just piano or other solo instrument accompaniment, or at best, a small backing ensemble, and so are low-budget and logistically undemanding. Complex orchestrations can be added, large-scale opera and oratorio are the grander relations of this tradition.

Long time listeners here will not need me to say that a typical Parlando Project piece doesn’t sound like art song, even if it sits inside the definition. More on that soon – but art song ought to be right up my alley, right? I’ve listened to a fair amount of art song in the decades since. If my energy and life avails, I’m still amendable to hearing more of art song in concert, particularly by modern composers. And…

…I don’t care much for a lot of it. Oh, I almost always admire the training and skill of the singers and their competent musicians. I observe and admire the composers’ shared goals with my own. It’s easy for me to see them as fellow strivers intending to bring the expanded palette of music to the sound and dance of poetry. The whole enterprise, singers, accompanists, composers have resources objectively beyond those I can marshal – which should be a good thing. In thinking about this paradox, I think that’s part of the problem. And no, I’m not talking about jealousy. I genuinely want them to succeed every time, and if it’s only sometimes that I think they do – well, batting averages and shots on goal percentages come with the effort. They certainly do with my art.

Here’s a setting by Libby Larsen. Notice how the singer increases the level of ornamentation after the opening verse. I’ve briefly met Larsen, a couple of times., and like Bolcom I admire the aims of her work.

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First off, the composers often write complex melodies. Hampered by my lousy singing talents, I feel my pieces should have more melody – but with the art song composers I often think their elaborateness obscures the impact of the words rather than reinforcing them. The “word-music” and phrasing of the poetry can be contorted to fit the melody’s interest, and only sometimes will that contortion produce interesting effects by abstracting the flow an actor would use rendering the words, with unexpected phrasing being applied from the notes. In these matters I sometimes think of the stillborn dream of one of the most musical of English-language poets, William Butler Yeats: to create a para-art-song tradition that would preserve more of his “word music.” I’m just a naïve composer, a nobody, but I’d suggest that harmonic or timbral elaboration might better stand in for over-reliance on melodic complexity in art song with significant poetry.

Another performance of Larsen’s setting of Cather’s poem. Would this singer be judged as lacking the technical polish of the ones above? Even if so, I preferred it. Sung at a slower tempo and I sense the singer wants to inflect more meaning into the words.

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The singers or conductors, working from score, are asked to faithfully reproduce the composer, but I believe they are allowed some freedom in ornament. Given that constrained outlet, there’s a temptation to over-exercise this. Even from my limited knowledge, I know that some of the vocal articulations are traditional techniques in classical singing to express emotional states. Like all conventions (even contemporary ones in vernacular music) they risk being misunderstood or even taken for cliches when the convention isn’t correctly “translated” by the listener.

And now for someone else doing something with the same “The Hawthorn Tree” poem, using an approach much like mine. The performer (and, I believe composer) David Ellis has done nothing I can locate since issuing a set of 4 poem settings similar to this one, and they don’t seem to be widely available.

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Does a thru-line become apparent as I wrap this up? I probably come to art song believing in the power of the words to work for an audience with less adornment, and this may be the prejudice of a poet who later composed music and preforms it with their personal limited skills.*** I suspect all these dangers and detriments are already known to trained composers and performers, just as I know intimately the limitations I work with in making my pieces here. I respect their hard work and knowledge.**** How some of their work is experienced by this listener may well be my limitations, though I suspect (however muffled inside my own makeup and experiences) I’m more amenable to traditional classical art song than large portions of its potential audience.

 

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*This is a paraphrase from an interview I read, and a report of what he himself did. Flavorful quotes I can grab from Zappa: “Drop out of school before your mind rots from exposure to our mediocre educational system. Forget about the Senior Prom and go to the library and educate yourself if you’ve got any guts” and “If you want to get laid, go to college. If you want an education, go to the library.” Generally lacking money for college, this iconoclasm was promising to me, but let me point out empirically that sustainable non-academic orchestral composing is even more unlikely than following the thin odds of a conventional academic route.

**I also worked in my adulthood for more than 20 years for a radio network with a 24-hour classical music service. Kind of like I was saying about SF literature and fandom a couple of posts back: I’m not an expert in that field, but I’ve hung around with folks that where.

***Some singers in the folk music field, performing with single or sparce accompaniment can do this, but with more melodicism than my voice can provide. One of the more enthralling concerts I’ve experienced was June Tabor and a keyboardist. I felt the meaning of every single word she sang that night.

****The Parlando Project is designed, and has met its goals so far, as a non-revenue thing, despite my putting serious effort into it. Most classical-tradition performers and composers receive very little revenue for all their efforts, study, and hard work invested in their art. If we hear each other’s results differently (as I suspect we do) I recognize that difference/similarity.