With about a week left before I must deliver the score and parts of Letter To Hungary, this is probably my last post for the month of October.
A few days ago, I reached the ending of the piece. All along it had been a toss-up whether it would be an enigmatic tear-jerker ending or one of those really entertaining crowd-pleasing endings. I’ve decided to with the latter, because it’s appropriate here, and off the top of my head, I don’t think I’ve ever done a really fun ending before.
So, now it’s down to closing a few gaps, polishing and mundane layout stuff. If it weren’t for Sibelius 4, I’d now be slaving over the task generating and editing parts. Yay Sibelius 4! Unless I just can’t resist, the next post here will be program notes, probably at the beginning of November. The performance is November 18th in Budapest. (details…)
On this day in 1956, what began as a small student demonstration snowballed into a national uprising. The students were joined 100,000 angry citizens as they marched to more impromptu demonstrations at various sites around Budapest. At the Parliament building they were met by Soviet tanks who fired on the crowd. The demonstrations then escalated into street battles between average citizens with Molotov cocktails and a force of Hungarian security police and the Soviet army.
In response, the Hungarian Communist Party installed a new Prime Minster, Imre Nagy, who they believed would placate the people to a degree. Nagy almost immediately announced plans to withdraw from the Warsaw Pact and hold multi-party elections. On November 4th, the Soviet Union sent tanks and airstrikes to take back control of Hungary. Nagy, who had taken assylum at the Yugoslav embassy, was tricked into surrendering (they promised him safe passage out of Hungary), and eventually executed.
The political circumstances and the events of these eleven days were too complicated to describe in detail here. However, dozens of good books have been written about what happened in Hungary in 1956.
Fast forward…
I went to Budapest in September, 1989 for what would be a three-year adventure in cake consumption (oh, and composition lessons too, I guess). On October 23rd, I had only been in Budapest for about six weeks. That evening, a crowd gathered in front of the Parliament building, where police had fired on the crowd 33 years earlier, and quietly held candles as they received the news that the People’s Republic of Hungary was now to be known simply as the “Republic of Hungary”, and that national multi-party elections would be held in May, 1990. During the next three years, I got to witness up close the beginning of an amazing transformation.
Until 1989, the 1956 uprising was never discussed officially. The official line was to clear your throat and stare at the floor while mumbling something about a “counterrevolutionary incident”. But starting in 1989, the uprising was officially acknowledged, and now October 23rd is a national holiday.
Sorry. Not much of a post here. This is something my two-year-old son said at dinner this evening. I won’t ruin it by describing the context. Suffice it to say it made perfect sense at the time.
My post about Doctor Atomic has got me thinking about this whole business of effectively setting poetry to music. This is something John Adams has always been exceptionally good at, even if I don’t agree with his approach to writing for the stage. But it’s certainly not a given that any good composer would be able to do this well.
Most of my career has focused on writing for the voice, whether it was for art songs, choral pieces or theatrical works, and so being able to analyze a text is something I’ve had to learn (and am still learning). I recently adjudicated a composition competition where many of the submissions were vocal pieces, and it was a big surprise how few of those composers seemed to know, or even care, much about how to handle a text.
Personally, I’ve always been drawn to theater, and that type of text setting comes to me fairly naturally. Of course, it helps that in that type of project, one normally has the ability to help shape the text according to the requirements of musical setting (or write it oneself, which I’ve been doing lately). But in the case of setting poetry, as is usually done with art songs and choral pieces, it’s been more of a struggle.
For starters, the process of choosing texts can be daunting. I’ve only once been given a specific poem to set (e.e. cummings’ “I think you God for most this Amazing”), and it was just pure dumb luck that it happened to be appropriate for musical setting. I’m very picky. For me, in order for a poem to be “settable”, it needs to have very short lines and very few ideas packed into a stanza, which disqualifies most poems. I think a lot of composers fail to recognize that most poetry stands on its own without music, and shouldn’t be monkeyed with. Poetry should be chosen that leaves space for the composer to enhance it through music — perhaps to draw out a hidden meaning. There needs to be room for interpretation.
Here’s an example of a wonderful poem by Emily Dickinson that’s short enough to allow a composer to take his or her time coloring each line. I used this poem in my chorus/orchestra piece Cycle of Friends, and used repetition to stretch the poem into a musical form (think Kyrie Eleison in a Mass).
Listen here:
Are Friends Delight or Pain?
Could Bounty but remain
Riches were good –
But if they only stay
Ampler to fly away
Riches are sad.
For composers wishing to improve their text analysis skills, a great resource was just published a few months ago. In Break, Blow, Burn Camille Paglia walks you through her own reading of 43 poems from various periods. (I’m still working my way through it.) The point isn’t whether you agree with her readings. If, like me, you haven’t had extensive training in this area, reading her explanations gives you a feel for what to look for when choosing and setting poetry. Unless you’re an English major, you probably need this book, or something like it.
Sidebar
I can’t help mentioning that Dr. Paglia was one of my teachers at the University of the Arts before her first book Sexual Personae made her a celebrity. All I can say is, yeah, she’s really like that.
So much has been written about Doctor Atomic now that I hope I can avoid being redundant. I am not a critic, or even much of a writer for that matter, so this may not be the most well organized set of thoughts, and I hope I can get my point across without seeming shrill or pontifical. Lisa Hirsch has a running list of reviews and blogs that cover the premiere, many of which are much more thorough than I intend to be, and so if you haven’t read anything about the piece yet, it might be a good idea to start there.
The long and the short of it is that Doctor Atomic is a thoroughly engaging and memorable evening, and I’m really glad I went, despite its major flaw. In fact, whereas normally I might have the urge to look at my watch at some point during a three-hour opera, in this case I didn’t do so until I was outside and couldn’t believe that it was after 11:00. I mention this in order to soften my overall tone, because as much as I did enjoy the piece, I was disappointed that this work did not live up to its potential. (more…)
Today I found myself thinking about one of Bartók’s lesser-known works, the “Twenty Seven Choruses”.
My friend M., over on Music in a Suburban Scene, has expressed disappointment in the Bartók String Quartets, making the valid point that a lot of relentless dissonance can be boring. In defending the Quartets, I found myself referring to the Choruses, because they reveal the same genius as the quartets, only in a more accessible environment.
While I agree with M. in general that dissonance for its own sake makes pretty uninteresting music, it must be said that the dissonance in the Quartets comes about through a very sensible system of voice leading and a sound harmonic framework. By building upon tiny melodic fragments, and simply letting the harmonies fall out naturally, Bartók enters an expressive sound world where it’s worth meeting him halfway. After a few listenings, you realize that it’s more about what he’s doing with his melodic material and rhythm than harmony. Yes, you’ll be disappointed if you’re insisting upon predictable resolutions and goose-bumpy chords (although, they’re there if you’re listening). If you can join Bartók in this place, you’ll find the Quartets very satisfying.
Anyone who is Bartók Quartet-curious might consider first getting to know the Twenty-seven Choruses, for women’s or children’s voices. These are in a much more lyrical style than most of his instrumental work, but display the same contrapuntal and expressive proclivities that make the Quartets great. These very attractive and entertaining little pieces, which use Hungarian folk texts but entirely original music, were written in the mid-Thirties, around the same time as Quartet #5.
Incidentally, these make great teaching pieces for choral conductors. Some of them are deceptively complicated, and an example of just about any conducting problem can be found here.
It is gradually dawning on me how lucky I am to be able to see Doctor Atomic next week. I’m usually a bit of a homebody, and almost didn’t bother planning to go, but fortunately I snapped out of it, and I’m now suitably psyched. This seems like a good time to revisit some of the Adams pieces that were such an obsession for me in the past. Since I’m assuming I’ll write something about it after I see it, I thought I’d say something now about what my frame of reference is. (Otherwise, we would have a ridiculously long post.) [See Doctor Atomic posted 10/14]
Right now, I’m listening to Nixon in China, which I spent many, many hours with a long time ago, over a period of several years. It has now been years since I’ve taken this CD off the shelf. (The big “landing-of-Airforce-One” passage was enhanced somewhat by the fact that the Blue Angels were flying over my house, causing a terrifying roar that only a real writer could describe.) Upon casual listening, I have some new reservations about the piece as theater (which I’ll get into in a later post after seeing Doctor Atomic), but I have to say I’m enjoying the sweeping melodic lines and lush harmonies as much as ever.
I discovered John Adams when I was around twenty, a very formative time, and no composer’s music played a bigger role in shaping my aesthetic than his. In the late 80’s I sang in the Choral Arts Society of Philadelphia, a symphonic chorus frequently used by the Philadelphia Orchestra in those days. In 1988 we undertook John Adams’ choral masterpiece Harmonium (not with the Philly Orchestra, but on our own program), and I was never the same after that. (more…)
It’s amazing what you can accomplish when you’re under the gun. I’ve always said that I prefer to work on projects where there’s a concrete deadline, and I’m sure most composers feel this way. But, there are deadlines, and there are deadlines. Because of the way concerts are scheduled, at least in the U.S., a typical timeline for an orchestral commission is roughly a year, maybe nine months or so. A film score project can be as little as a month or six weeks (or less? I’m not really sure.)
As it happens, my current project is not for an American orchestra, but a European one. Because concerts aren’t necessarily scheduled so far in advance there, the orchestra I’m working with had the flexibility to put together a very interesting program in very little time. I was contacted at the end of July about writing this 15-minute piece that will go up in the middle of November. At first it seemed like an untenably tight timeline, but this opportunity is special for both personal and professional reasons, and turning it down was simply out of the question.
have been written about what happened in Hungary in 1956.
made her a celebrity. All I can say is, yeah, she’s really like that.
