This latest piece (as of June 2024) from Elaine Hagenberg perfectly embodies her style: the use of an unfamiliar and enigmatic text and dramatic, sweeping musical lines: “Swifter than Flame,” for SATB chorus with the text from a poet by Carl John Bostelmann, who wrote primarily in the 1920’s and 30’s. I don’t do musical analysis in these posts and so will simply say that she manages harmonic sweetness that never topples over into syrupiness. There’s an edge there, a drive. My own choir, the Cherry Creek Chorale, has sung a number of her pieces and also participated in the commissioning consortium for her first major-length work, Illuminare, with Hagenberg herself participating in one of our rehearsals during concert week. Those of us who were privileged to be present that evening will never forget it.
I was very intrigued by the lyrics and wanted first of all to know more about the author, Carl John Bostelmann. He is perhaps best known as having written a behind-the-scenes look at John D. Rockefeller, Neighbor John, in cooperation with the photographer Curt E. Engelbrecht, who was allowed unusual access to the usually camera-shy Rockefeller. Bostelmann was also involved with various historical survey projects. For my purposes here, though, I’ve found that he published at least four volumes of poetry, a couple of which are available on Google Books, and that his work appeared during his lifetime in a number of poetry magazines. “Swifter than Flame,” however, doesn’t show up in any of these available sources.
I wonder, therefore, if Hagenberg found the poem in the book highlighted in her video on choosing texts for choral music, Words of Life: A Religious and Inspirational Album Containing over 1000 Quotations from the Minds and Hearts of Writers of Twenty Centuries. I’ve referenced Hagenberg’s fascinating material in an earlier post and will include a link to it below in this post also. The book she’s holding up in the video turned out to be available used for a very reasonable price, so I’ve ordered a copy for myself. One of the first things I’ll do when I get it is to search for the Bostelmann poem.
Since I’m on Hagenberg’s mailing list I get notice of her newly-released music; her newsletter introducing this piece said “If you missed the recent northern lights, I invite you to experience the night sky in exhilarating ascent with my newest piece for SATB chorus and piano!” So right away she gives us the interpretation that was in her mind as she wrote the music.
With all that being said, let’s turn to the poem itself. It’s very short, so I’ll quote the entire text before going on:
Swifter than flame,
prevailing tempests race
Along the lifted steel
that bars their way.
From solid street
up to the shore of space,
Each granite edifice
transcends the day.
Tower on tower
reach a final rung
From which winged feet
step upward out of night–
To find again
forgotten planets hung
In orbits
measuring a timeless flight.
As I pointed out earlier, Hagenberg mentions the northern lights in connection with the imagery in Bostelmann’s poem, but I think I must respectfully disagree with that analysis—always acknowledging that there’s no one “right” interpretation of a poem. My reasoning centers on the first two lines: we are not talking about flames, but about something “swifter than flame.” And what is that? It’s “prevailing tempests,” or some type of violent storm. And where is this storm? Well, I think—and perhaps I’m being too literal, but there it is—that we’re talking about something happening in a city, with steel, granite edifices, and streets. Bostelmann was perhaps caught in a big windstorm one day while walking through the streets of a city and was struck with the imagery of the tempest whipping between the buildings and then gusting up into the sky, with its destination being unbounded space.
If we go with the storm-in-the-city scenario, Bostelmann is posing a nice juxtaposition of man’s puny accomplishments against the power of nature—and indeed of the universe. I love the imagery in the first lines of the second stanza: no matter how high the manmade towers are, the wind and storm soar higher, out of sight and off from earth, on “winged feet.” Their destination? Planets that are so far away they’re “forgotten.” (Just as a little sidenote here: the last planet in the solar system, Pluto, wasn’t discovered until 1930. But I’m not sure when Bostelmann wrote this poem, so perhaps he wasn’t thinking of that scientific event. Yes, yes—I know Pluto has now been downgraded to something less than full-planet status, but that didn’t happen until 2006.) Bostelmann also references the idea that time itself does not exist in space, thus the duration of these planets’ orbits is “timeless.” You can dive down any number of rabbit holes on this esoteric topic if you’d like to do so; the Wikipedia article on the subject is quite interesting.1 I don’t know how much interest Bostelmann had in such theoretical concepts, but he can’t have escaped knowing at least a little about them as a professional writer (although not a scientist) living in the first half of the 20th century. No one in the Western world could fail to have at least a passing acquaintance with daring new thinkers such as Albert Einstein.
But Bostelmann turned the science into poetry, if he indeed was thinking of science, and now Hagenberg has turned the poetry into song. Pretty cool, huh?
Here’s the official video from Hagenberg’s website, with some truly stunning visuals to accompany it:
And here is the aforementioned video from Hagenberg’s video series on composing: “Lesson 1.2: Discovering Great Texts” I can’t embed the video directly, as it’s on her website and not on YouTube.
