Art Songs

An Italian writes Spanish songs for guitar and chorus

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various images of the composer Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco, accessed via the website https://mariocastelnuovotedesco.com/new-light-on-intellectuals-who-fled-fascist-italy/

Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco Falls in Love with Spain and the Guitar

How likely is it that an 18-year-old Italian Jewish boy was given a trip to Spain as a graduation gift by his parents and fell in love with the country even though he never returned? That seems to have indeed happened to the young Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco, so much so that “It was in Spain, as nowhere else that he felt at home…the experience left him with deep impressions that would one day be reflected in his music.”

Indeed, Castelnuovo-Tedesco is a completely fascinating character, who lived a remarkable life even as he dealt with the traumas of bad health, anti-Semitism, and a total uprooting of his life. There is no way I can deal with his biography in any thorough way at all, but I’d encourage you to at least read the Wikipedia article about him if he sounds interesting to you. (But I will include the tidbit here that his hyphenated last name came about because of an inheritance requirement put on his grandfather. You’ll see in the following material that sometimes I just use the initials of his last name.) It’s fascinating to note that a chance meeting with the Spanish guitarist Andrés Segovia at a music festival in Venice sparked C-T’s eventual composition of over 100 works for the guitar, an instrument he knew nothing about and had never played before this point. But for some reason Segovia asked the composer to write a piece for him. C-T said yes at the time, but later had second thoughts:

Dear Segovia: It would be a great pleasure to write something for you, because I have had the occasion to admire you many times. However, I must confess that I do not know your instrument and I do not have the remotest idea on how to compose for it.

But the great guitarist persisted, encouraging the composer to study other works for the guitar, and eventually C-T sent along his “Variazioni attraverso I secoli” (“Variations Across the Centuries”). Segovia replied that: “It is the first time I have met a musician who understands immediately how to write for the guitar.”

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The story behind the Whitacre/Plitmann “Five Hebrew Love Songs”

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The German town of Speyer, where the Five Hebrew Love Songs was first performed. Image accessed via Pixabay.

Sometimes the genesis of a now-popular piece can be almost unbearably poignant in light of the present. Such is the case with the popular Five Hebrew Love Songs with music by Eric Whitacre and lyrics by Hila Plitmann. Both composer and lyricist have been extremely open about the meaning of the words. Here, for example, is a relevant paragraph from Whitacre’s website, describing how the songs came about in 1996 as the result of a request from the violinist Friedemann Eichhorn:

Because we were appearing as a band of traveling musicians, ‘Friedy’ asked me to write a set of troubadour songs for piano, violin and soprano. I asked [then-girlfriend] Hila (who was born and raised in Jerusalem) to write me a few ‘postcards’ in her native tongue, and a few days later she presented me with these exquisite and delicate Hebrew poems. I set them while we vacationed in a small skiing village in the Swiss Alps, and we performed them [Plitmann sang the soprano part] for the first time a week later in Speyer.

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William Butler Yeats’ Dreams of the Countess Kathleen and Her Blessed Spirit

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Dante Gabriel Rossetti The Blessed Damozel.jpg
“The Blessed Damozel” by Dante Gabriel Rossetti; image accessed via Wikipedia.

William Butler Yeats, the great Irish poet of the late 1800’s and early 1900’s, was obsessed with Irish legends and the occult. The story behind his poem “A Dream of a Blessed Spirit” neatly encapsulates both ideas, since it concerns a mythic Irish character, the Countess Kathleen O’Shea, who sold all her goods and finally her soul to help her starving tenants. Because the Countess had given her soul for the good of others and not to enrich herself, God refused to let her be damned and instead brought her to heaven. Yeats also wrote a whole play about her, but it’s safe to say that it’s never performed these days. The poem, on the other hand, has provided the text for a lovely art song that is quite popular. My own group, the Cherry Creek Chorale in the Denver metro area, has programmed it several times. I found the words to be fascinating and puzzling:

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The True Story Behind the Text of “Even When He Is Silent”

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Image accessed via website humanistseminarian.com; no attribution given

Who wrote the text of “Even When He Is Silent” and under what circumstances? Do these questions matter?

I believe in the sun even when it’s not shining.
I believe in love when I feel it not
I believe in God even when he is silent.

Found written on a concentration camp wall after World War II

That’s the text used in the lovely piece that my own choir, the Cherry Creek Chorale, is performing/has performed in October 2022, a setting written in 2011 by the Norwegian composer Kim André Arnesen. Given my own fascination with history I was curious to find out a little bit more about these words: Which concentration camp? Who might have written them? My internet diving turned up some surprising facts about the lines, facts that only deepened and strengthened their power.

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Was “Jeanie with the Light Brown Hair” a real person?

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Original sheet music cover accessed via Wikipedia; no, this isn’t the actual Jeanie.

Poor Stephen Foster! He wrote a romantic song about his wife and it’s been turned into endless jokes. I’ve managed to find at least four “genie/hare” references just in old Bugs Bunny cartoons alone. And everyone knows how unbelievably awful the TV series “I Dream of Jeannie” was. (Yes. It was. No ifs, ands or buts about it.)

So, where to begin? That’s a frequent question in these posts. Let’s start with the hair, since it’s such a feature of the woman in the song. To say nowadays that someone has “light brown hair” isn’t exactly a compliment. It sounds blah, doesn’t it? Instead you’d probably say “dirty blonde,” although why that’s considered a flattering description is beyond me. Someone might have “ash blonde” hair that has no hint of red in it, but rarely would you say “ash brown,” even though that would just be a somewhat darker shade. On the other side of the spectrum you might call someone a “strawberry blonde,” but until I did some googling I’d never seen the term “strawberry brown.” It exists, though, as a light reddish brown. Kinda pretty, actually.

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Robert Frost and Randall Thompson’s Frostiana (with other rabbit trails along the way)

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Robert Frost in 1941; image accessed via Wikipedia

Introduction

This will be very long for a blog post/article but too short for a whole separate book, so note the Table of Contents box above that you can use as needed or desired. My goal here is to focus primarily on Randall Thompson’s Frostiana, looking at the circumstances of its composition and the seven poems individually that comprise it, but with plenty of info about Robert Frost the man and poet and also a bit about a couple of other composers who have set Frost’s poetry to music. An individual video is included for each song, with a full performance of the Thompson suite at the end. Other bonus videos are included!

Let me start by explaining my own history of singing music set to texts by Robert Frost.  As a member of the Cherry Creek Chorale here in the Denver area I’ve sung “The Pasture” by Z. Randall Stroope, “The Road Not Taken” and “Choose Something Like a Star” from Frostiana by Randall Thompson, and “Sleep” by Eric Whitacre, which started out its life as a setting of Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.” Then, as a grand finale to all this Frost-y stuff (sorry), I’m getting to sing the entire Frostiana in May of 2022 with my group. If you’re reading this before May 6-7 2022, you can follow the link above to visit the choir’s website and attend the concert. It’s going to be g-r-e-a-t!

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Silvestri and Gjeilo Add a Twist to the Phoenix Story

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Image by Mystic Art Design from Pixabay

The lyrics to this piece come from the contemporary poet Charles A. Silvestri, who “specializes in providing bespoke poetry for choral composers.” Rather like a custom tailor, I guess. He has written the lyrics for a number of pieces by the Norwegian choral composer Ola Gjeilo and says of this one that “The fiery sky at sunset was an inspiration for this poem about a phoenix preparing for rebirth.. . . Ola had asked me for several poems relating to the theme of rebirth, and I gave him this twist on the usual theme.”

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Jocelyn Hagen Encourages Us to Pray and Sing

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Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

I’ve had this experience many times: I get my new music for an upcoming concert with my choir, the Cherry Creek Chorale, take a look, and see composers’ names that are completely unfamiliar to me. Then I start doing research for these posts and find out that these unknown people are quite active in the world of choral music. Such was the case as I leafed through our sheet music for the March 2022 concert centered around works by American women and saw the name “Jocelyn Hagen” on the piece “I Will Sing and Pray.”

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A Hard Truth Expressed Joyfully–Gloria Srikijkarn’s “Laugh, Sing, Rejoice”

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Image by StockSnap from Pixabay

It’s an unusual concert at which there will be in attendance two composers of the music being performed. It’s even more unusual to have one of those composers actually singing in the choir. (We’re also singing an arrangement by a member of the choir; I’m going to try to get to that piece in a later post.) We’ve been privileged in the past to sing Gloria Srikijkarn’s rousing setting of Psalm 100; now we get to present her 2019 composition using lyrics from “Solitude” by the mid-19th-century American poet Ella Wheeler Wilcox. Srikijkarn is a long-time member of the Cherry Creek Chorale and at present serves as the chair of our artistic committee.

I asked the composer about her creative process with this song, and she told me that when she was growing up her father had a book of poetry containing “Solitude.” (The poem has as an alternate title “The Way of the World.” Don’t know why.) As an adult Srikijkarn remembered the poem and decided to set it to music, but when she went back and read the whole thing she realized that it was much darker than she’d thought. Her first draft ended up being unusable, and she used just half of the lines in her finished piece. Here they are:

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