SongNotes: Vocal Chamber Music
The Old Gray Couple is a bipartite poem written in MacLeish's late years. These are not a young person's thoughts. It is set as a duet for soprano, baritone, and piano four-hands. Archibald MacLeish died in 1982 at the age of 89, his wife Ada following two years later, aged 91. The couple in the poem have been together for fifty years. The MacLeishes were married for sixty-five.
Several musical ideas in this piece are revisited and extended in the final movement of the Sinfonietta for chamber orchestra. Indeed, there is a certain expansiveness to the duet itself. It begins with a mini overture that introduces the musical elements to follow. The pianists should think orchestrally in their approach.
The Prologue should be delivered in a neutral, narrative manner so there is a deliberate transition into character (She and He) for the Scene. (This piece inhabits a place somewhere between art song and theater, and I can imagine it being staged.) The pacing of this Scene needs to be quite elastic, to give the impression of a spontaneous conversation.
The dialogue is quite lighthearted at first: this is a couple long used to humorous sparring and apparently well-versed in their Shakespeare. At m.98, “Look, the old gray couple!” She pauses, as if catching a glimpse of herself in a mirror – there are moments when one suddenly realizes just how many years have passed. Here, the witty repartee turns to earnest reflection, and He spends the next few pages trying to articulate exactly what he means to say. However, even in the most serious moments, the atmosphere must never seem morose: these characters must always radiate warmth, wisdom, and humor.
The Old Gray Couple (1)
They have only to look at each other to laugh -
no one knows why, not even they:
something back in the lives they've lived,
something they both remember but no words can say.
They go off at an evening's end to talk
but they don't, or to sleep but they lie awake -
hardly a word, just a touch, just near,
just listening but not to hear.
Everything they know they know together -
everything, that is, but one:
their lives they've learned like secrets from each other;
their deaths they think of in the nights alone.
The Old Gray Couple (2)
She: Love, says the poet, has no reasons.
He: Not even after fifty years?
She: Particularly after fifty years.
He: What was it, then, that lured us, that still teases?
She: You used to say my plaited hair!
He: And then you'd laugh.
She: Because it wasn't plaited.
Love had no reason so you made one up
to laugh at. Look! The old, gray couple!
He: No, to prove the addage true:
Love has no reasons but old lovers do.
She: And they can't tell.
He: I can and so can you.
Fifty years ago we drew each other,
magnetized needle toward the longing north.
It was your naked presence that so moved me.
It was your absolute presence that was love.
She: Ah, was!
He: And now, years older, we begin to see
absence, not presence: what the world would be
without your footstep in the world - the garden
empty of the radiance where you are.
She: And that's your reason? - that old lovers see
their love because they know now what its loss will be?
He: Because, like Cleopatra in the play,
they know there's nothing left once love's away . . .
She: Nothing remarkable beneath the visiting moon . . .
He: Ours is the late, last wisdom of the afternoon.
We know that love, like light, grows dearer toward the
dark.
- Archibald MacLeish
River Songs: In his poem The Way It Is, William Staffords writes,
There's a thread you follow. It goes among
things that change. But it doesn't change...
Nothing you do can stop time's unfolding.
You don't ever let go of the thread.
Rivers thread through all the songs as do contrapuntal lines. .Stafford's was a quiet voice, and the first three songs in this set inhabit that intimate atmosphere.
Song to the Trees and Streams, on a Pawnee text, is a simple set of variations, gentle and unhurried, accompanying three verses of a strophic tune.
Ask Me, a bluesy reference to Schubert's Auf dem Flusse, shares with that song the observation that the water's frozen surface belies what might be happening beneath.
Quo Vadis is the sparest of the four. It must come from a place of stillness and wonder: what is it to be of, and yet not of the world?
After all this introspection, a simple V of V ushers in the expansive language of Walt Whitman in Crossing Brooklyn Ferry. Marked Exuberantly, this piece must dance in celebration and awe at the grandeur of the Hudson. I used this tune again in the first movement of my second piano concerto.
Song to the Trees and Streams
Dark against the sky yonder distant line
Lies before us. Trees we see, long the line of trees,
Bending, swaying in the breeze.
Bright with flashing light yonder distant line
Runs before us, swiftly runs, swift the river runs,
Winding, flowing, flowing o'er the land.
Hark, a sound, yonder distant sound
Comes to greet us, singing comes, soft the river's song,
Rippling gently beneath the trees.
- Pawnee
Ask Me
Some time when the river is ice ask me
mistakes I have made. Ask me whether
what I have done is my life. Others
have come in their slow way into
my thought, and some have tried to help
or to hurt: ask me what difference
their strongest love or hate has made.
I will listen to what you say.
You and I can turn and look
at the silent river and wait. We know
the current is there, hidden; and there
are comings and goings from miles away
that hold the stillness exactly before us.
What the river says, that is what I say.
- William Stafford
Quo Vadis
Sometimes I choose a cloud and let it
cross the sky floating me away.
Or a bird unravels its song and carries me
as it flies deeper and deeper into the woods.
Is there a way to be gone and still
belong? Travel that takes you home?
Is that life? – to stand by a river and go.
- William Stafford
Crossing Brooklyn Ferry
Ah, what can be more stately to me than mast-hemmed Manhattan?
River and sunset and scallop-edg'd waves of floodtide?
Gorgeous clouds of the sunset! Drench with your splendor me!
Stand up, tall masts of Manahatta! Stand up! Beautiful hills of Brooklyn!
Flow on, river! Flow with the flood tide, and ebb with the ebb-tide!
Fly on, sea birds! Fly sideways, or wheel in large circles high in the air!
Receive the summer sky, you water,
and faithfully hold it till all downcast eyes have time to take it from you!
We fathom you not – we love you. You furnish your parts toward eternity,
Great and small, you furnish your parts toward the soul.
- Walt Whitman
Another Place (for soprano and String Quartet) see Volume 6.
The Book of Uncommon Prayer
The Book of Uncommon Prayer is a title borrowed from the handsome volume of poetry by poet/novelist Katherine Mosby. The poem are short, eloquent meditations, exhortations, and uncompromising glimpses of the self in which she formulates, in her own words, “A form of prayer broad enough to include people who can't name their god.” Ms. Mosby's poems provided me with portals to related poems, and with an adhesive to bind the cycle together. There is no through line in the piece: the juxtaposition of texts is purely associative. This cycle is thus a meditation on a meditation, touching on some of the things for which we pray: sacred, secular, and seemingly quite profane. It is written for vocal quartet (SATB) and piano.
The Confitebor is two verses from Psalm 42, but appears here in Latin because it is part of the opening prayers of the Ordinary of the Mass. Its last line, “Why are thou sad, my soul, and why dost thou trouble me?” and that of Bleach my bones “Let one day the shadow lift that binds my soul to sadness” intersect at a fundamental unease in the human condition.
Teach me the beauty and I Stop Writing the Poem stand in stark contrast to each other, the one describing an inner wilderness, the other domestic routine, but there is a lesson learned in both. The emptiness of the self is echoed in the emptiness of the shirt, arms in a folded embrace, foreshadowing the death of the poet's husband from a long illness.
Help me to laugh and Old Photograph share laughing as a theme, but the laughter of MacLeish's young woman (his wife Ada, an operatic soprano) appears forced. She seems to be saying to the lens, “Ne me touchez pas”, the first words of Melisande to Golaud in Debussy's Pelléas et Mélisande. The song is made from musical snippets of the opera. The couple alluded to in the poem, Gerald and Sara Murphy, were wealthy arts patrons (Gerald being an accomplished painter) who lived for a time as expatriates in a chalet in Cap d'Antibes that they dubbed “Villa America”. They regularly played host to Picasso, Hemingway, John Dos Passos and his wife, the Fitzgeralds and the MacLeishes, and many other creative luminaries of the early twentieth century.
Archibald MacLeish's The Two Priests and Music and Drum are two poems put together in one setting. The anti-clerical, anti-establishment tone is refreshing, coming from a lawyer who served as assistant director of the Office of War Information from 1942-1943. MacLeish also served as assistant secretary of state for cultural and public affairs and wrote speeches for Franklin Roosevelt.
The decidedly secular exhortations of Let sing the bedsprings serve as prelude to Lawrence Ferlinghetti's lusty, beat hallucination, San Jose Symphony Reception (In Flagrante delicto). Lawrence Ferlinghetti was friends with San Francisco Symphony director George Cleve for twenty years. Cleve invited him to an after-party following a concert for what Ferlinghetti referred to as the 'donor class'. This poem was his response. The music veers from quasi-Liszt through fractured Bach, to a sly allusion to a Brahms cello sonata. This scene well could be a circle in a present-day Inferno, its frustrated denizens forever on the make.
Take Hands, on a poem by Laura Riding, provides a moment of respite and a glimmer of hope.
Two poems of journey follow: For I have come so long is accompanied by variations over a repeating 12-note bass figure, suggesting weary travel, never arriving. In contrast, Calypso is a gentle song of anticipation and homecoming, complete with an instructive moral at the end. The poet supplies accent marks in the text, sometimes on unexpected syllables to insure an island lilt.
The next three poems share the grave as their subject, albeit in very different ways. Much of Kenneth Patchen's poetry speaks of the horrors of war, and Breathe on the Living was penned during or just after World War II. It is set as a chorale. Archibald MacLeish's Words to Be Spoken is inscribed, “For Baoth Wiborg, son of Gerald and Sara Murphy, who died in New England in his sixteenth year and a tree was planted there.” He died in 1935 of meningitis. Mark Strand's brilliantly nihilistic Some Last Words, which begins with a rude mangling of one of Jesus' parables, is a wry allusion to the Seven Last Words of Christ.
Hope, and the opening music returns in Angels have I none and The Phoenix Prayer, two poems by Katherine Mosby, the latter being the last poem in the volume.
As the piece began with a standard prayer, it ends with Keep Watch, with text taken from the Anglican Book of Common Prayer. A short postlude recalls some earlier musical thoughts, but ruminates predominantly on the initial question, “Why are thou sad, my soul, and why dost thou trouble me?”
1. Confitebor
Confitebor tibi in cithara,
Deus, Deus meus:
Quare tristis est,
Anima mea,
Et quare conturbas me?
[I will praise Thee upon the harp,
O God, my God:
Why art thou sad, my soul,
And why dost thou trouble me?]
2. Teach me the beauty
Teach me the beauty
of my emptiness:
the white sky
not even a crow
will mark with its
jagged flight
or fierce cry.
Fill the hollows
of my ribs with wind
until they ring
like drained glasses
rubbed into song.
- Katherine Mosby
3. I Stop Writing the Poem
I stop writing the poem
to fold the clothes. No matter who lives
or who dies, I'm still a woman.
I'll always have plenty to do.
I bring the arms of his shirt
together. Nothing can stop
our tenderness. I'll get back
to the poem. I'll get back to being
a woman. But for now,
there's a shirt, a giant shirt
in my hands, and somewhere a small girl
standing next to her mother
watching to see how it's done.
- Tess Gallagher
4. Help me to laugh
Help me to laugh
with so much heart
I shake the trees
and tremble the quiet
pools. Surprise
the old carp
and warblers
with my joy.
Multiply my delights
till they surround
me like an echo
revolving
in a gorge.
- Katherine Mosby
5. Old Photograph
There she is. At Antibes I'd guess
by the pines, the garden, the sea shine.
She's laughing. Oh, she always laughed
at cameras. She'd laugh and run
before that devil in the lens could catch her.
He's caught her this time though: look at her
eyes – her eyes aren't laughing.
There's no such thing as a fragrance in a photograph
but this one seems to hold a fragrance –
fresh-washed gingham in a summer wind.
Old? Oh, thirty maybe. Almost thirty.
This would have been the year I went to Persia –
they called it Persia then – Shiraz,
Bushire, the Caspian, Isfahan.
She sent me the news in envelopes lined in blue.
The children were well. The Murphys were angels:
they had given her new potatoes as sweet as peas
on a white plate under the linden tree.
She was singing Melisande with Croiza –
“mes longs cheveux.” She was quite, quite well.
I was almost out of my mind with longing for her . . .
There she is that summer in Antibes –
laughing
with frightened eyes.
- Archibald MacLeish
6. The Two Priests
Man in the West
Man in the East
Man lives best
Who loves life least,
Says the Priest in the West.
Man in the flesh
Man in the ghost
Man lives best
Who fears death most,
Says the Priest in the East.
Man in the West
Man in the East
Man in the flesh
Man in the ghost
Man lives best
Who loves life most,
Who fears death least,
Says Man to the Priest
In the East, in the West.
- Archibald MacLeish
7. Let sing the bedsprings
Let sing the bedsprings
the choirboys
and mating cats.
Ring all the bells
and raise the blinds:
Let this feeling
overflow
and swell the room
with light
- Katherine Mosby
8. San Jose Symphony Reception (in flagrante delicto)
The bald man in plaid playing the harpsichord
stopped short and sidled over
to the sideboard
and copped a piece of Moka
on a silver plate
and slid back and started playing again
some kind of Hungarian rhapsodate
while the lady in the green eyeshades
leaned over him exuding
admiration and lust
Half-notes danced & tumbled
out of his instrument
exuding a faint odor of
chocolate cake
In the corner I was taking
a course in musical destruction
from the dark lady cellist
who bent over me with her bow unsheathed
and proceeded to saw me in half
As a consequence my pants fell right off
revealing a badly bent trombone which
even the first flutist
who had perfect embouchure
couldn't straighten out
- Lawrence Ferlinghetti
9. Take Hands
Take hands.
There is no love now.
But there are hands.
There is no joining now,
But a joining has been
Of a fastening of fingers
And their opening.
More than the clasp even, the kiss
Speaks loneliness,
How we dwell apart,
And how love triumphs in this.
- Laura Riding
10. For I have come so long
For I have come
so long without
a sign
into my path
shed moments
like the shake
of leaves
in handfuls
ripe and random,
a little grace
the comfort
of this gift.
- Katherine Mosby
11. Calypso
Dríver drive fáster and máke a good rún
Down the Spríngfield Line únder the shíning sún.
Flý like an áeroplane, don't pull up shórt
Till you bráke for Grand Céntral Státion New Yórk.
For thére in the míddle of thát waiting-háll
Should be stánding the óne that Í love best of áll.
If he's nót there to méet me when Í get to tówn,
I'll stánd on the síde-walk with téars rolling dówn.
For hé is the óne that I lóve to look ón,
The ácme of kíndness and pérfectión.
He présses my hánd and he sáys he loves mé,
Which I fínd an admiráble pecúliaritý.
The wóods are bright gréen on both sídes of the líne;
The trées have their lóves though they're dífferent from mine.
But the póor fat old bánker in the sún-parlor cár
Has nó one to lóve him excépt his cigár.
If Í were the héad of the Chúrch or the Státe,
I'd pówder my nóse and just téll them to wáit.
For lóve's more impórtant and pówerful thán
Éven a príest or a póliticián.
- W. H. Auden
12. Chorale: Breathe on the Living
Breathe on the living,
They are numb.
The dead have tidings,
These have none.
Stones roll off graves,
Men rise not.
Your Son was saved,
Ours cry out.
Send down a light,
All's dark here.
And prove not your love,
As men have done.
- Kenneth Patchen
13. Words To Be Spoken
for Baoth Wiborg son of Gerald and Sara Murphy who died in
New England in his sixteenth year and a tree was planted there
O shallow ground
That over ledges
Shoulders the gentle year,
Tender O shallow
Ground your grass is
Sisterly touching us:
Your trees are still:
They stand at our side in the
Night lantern
Sister O shallow
Ground you inherit
Death as we do.
Your year also –
The young face,
The voice – vanishes.
Sister O shallow
Ground
let the silence of
Green be between us
And the green sound.
- Archibald MacLeish
14. Some Last Words
1.
It is easier for a needle to pass through a camel
Than for a poor man to enter a woman of means.
Just go to the graveyard and ask around.
2.
Eventually, you slip outside, letting the door
Bang shut on your latest thought. What was it, anyway?
Just go to the graveyard and ask around.
3.
“Negligence” is the perfume I love.
O Fedora. Fedora. If you want any,
Just go to the graveyard and ask around.
4.
The bones of the buffalo, the rabbit at sunset,
The wind and its double, the tree, the town . . .
Just go to the graveyard and ask around.
5.
If you think good things are on their way
And the world will improve, don't hold your breath.
Just go to the graveyard and ask around.
6.
You over there, why don't you ask if this is the valley
Of limitless blue, and if we are its prisoners?
Just go to the graveyard and ask around.
7.
Life is a dream that is never recalled when the sleeper awakes.
If this is beyond you, Magnificent One,
Just go to the graveyard and ask around.
- Mark Strand
15. Angels have I none
Angels have I none
nor hope enough
to fill this length of day
yet will my heart
rush
at a swell of geese
arising
and the bells
dispersing evensong
like smoke
in the thickening air.
- Katherine Mosby
16. Keep Watch
Keep watch
with those who work,
or watch,
or weep this night,
and give your angels
charge over those who sleep.
Now that we come
to the setting of the sun,
and our eyes behold
the vesper light,
stay with us,
for evening is at hand
and our work is done.
Yours is the day,
yours also the night;
darkness is not dark
to you.
Guide us waking,
and guard us sleeping;
that awake
we may watch,
and asleep
we may rest in peace.
- The Book of Common Prayer
Bleach my bones
Bleach my bones
and twine my hair
when I am gome
feed my flesh to pigeons
or jackals
or the old men
who need to warm themselves
but first grant me
this: let one dy
the shadow lift
that binds
my soul to sadness.
- Katherine Mosby
Music and Drum
When men turn mob
Drums throb:
When mod turns men
Music again.
When sould secome Church
Drums beat the search:
When Church becomes souls
Sweet music tolls.
When State is the master
Drums beat disaster:
When master is man
Music can.
Each to be one,
Each to be whole,
Body and soul,
Music's begun.
The Phoenix Prayer
A gentle stirring
like the flutters
of birds
filling the garden
like vowels
swelling in the mouth
tentative kisses
these unfinished prayers:
Do not break my heart.