Art Songs Archives - Page 4 of 6

Blue Bird Thoughts

December 15, 2020May 2, 2019 by debisimons

I’ve written about bluebirds before, when I asked why Uncle Remus had a bluebird on his shoulder in the song “Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah,” and I revisited that image when I talked about “Over the Rainbow.” Now I want to re-revisit the topic in a short post about the short piece “The Blue Bird” by Charles V. Stanford with lyrics by Mary Coleridge. I probably can’t add anything to the musical analysis given below by a professional, so I’ll confine myself to some info on the author of the text and also about the composer.

The Fascinating Backstory on Franz Biebl’s “Ave Maria”

July 22, 2021December 4, 2018 by debisimons

You just never know what you’re going to find out when you google something! I assumed (a common action for me) that Franz Biebl was someone who lived several hundred years ago, as the music has a very old-ish feel to me. Perhaps he lived in the 1600’s or 1700’s? And it certainly would never have occurred to me that:

1) the piece has become a favorite of brass bands, particularly marching bands, and 2) the piece was the subject of a lawsuit that went all the way to the Supreme Court of the United States.

But I’ll get to the info on these two fascinating facts in a minute.

“Oread Farewell” and Its Many Meanings

December 15, 2020May 7, 2018 by debisimons

Overlooking Lawerence and the Kansas River. (Boston Public Library) (cropped).jpg — Old North College, the first building on the University of Kansas campus, at the northeast promontory of Mount Oread, looking north over Lawrence and the Kansas River, ca. 1867. Image accessed via Wikipedia.

One of the great privileges of performing classical music is that you get to delve into pieces written hundreds of years ago and others written within this century. If you’re fortunate you get to read or watch interviews with the composers and lyricists of modern music. Such is the case with the modern choral composer Dan Forrest, whose music my own choir has performed multiple times. We are also familiar with the work of poet/lyricist Anthony Silvestri, who provided the text. “Oread” was featured in our May 2018 concert as the closing piece, performed in the round.

So the first question is, “What’s an oread? And why is Forrest saying good-bye to whatever it is?” First things first. “Oread” is a term from Greek mythology meaning a mountain nymph. (Echo was one such, who was a consort of Zeus and was doomed by Hera, Zeus’s wife, to speak only the last words that had been spoken to her. Thus, when Echo fell in love with Narcissus, she couldn’t tell him how she felt and was forced to watch him falling in love with his own reflection in a pool.) So “oread” would be a suitable name for a mountain itself.

The Rich Imagery in Ferril’s Texts for Effinger’s “Four Pastorales”

October 15, 2020March 12, 2018 by debisimons

Both Thomas Hornsby Ferril and Cecil Effinger are fascinating characters. Ferril was Colorado’s first poet laureate, holding that title from 1979 until his death in 1988. He was chosen to write the captions for the first-floor rotunda in the Colorado state capitol building in Denver, and his home in the Capitol Hill neighborhood is a historical and literary landmark. Effinger was a Colorado composer and contemporary of Ferril who should be much better known than he is, having written well over 150 works, including operas and symphonies. But his fame rests largely on the Pastorales, a fact that he was wont to get a little testy about at times. As he’s said, “I’ve got the Four Pastorales for Oboe and Chorus which has gone hog-wild all over the place! It is done time and time again, you know, and others that I think are just as good, somehow don’t find their way!”

I would love to know how Effinger chose these four poems; I thought at first that Ferril had put them together into a set, but that’s not true. The poems are from several different books of Ferril’s poetry and don’t have a unifying theme that I can see. I’m going to guess that these four just happened to catch Effinger’s eye. The suite has a lovely, haunting oboe accompaniment which adds to its evocative power and is probably one reason for its popularity. Here are the four poems with my attempts to analyze/explain them without ruining the poetry.

Is “Oh Hush Thee” a Christmas Song?

December 15, 2020September 25, 2017 by debisimons

Image from the Library of Congress, Storer, Florence Edith, artist created circa 1912

The original title of this poem is “Christmas Eve,” and it was published in a book of poems and short stories by Eugene Field called Christmas Tales and Christmas Verse. So those facts would seem to end the matter. It’s a lullaby being sung by a mother to her child at Christmas, with stars and angels in the mix. It must be Mary singing to the baby Jesus, right? Well, I don’t think so.

Why not? First of all, look at the illustration that goes with the poem. It’s of an early 1900’s mother and child—and note the “child” part, as it’s not a baby. Secondly, consider the title: “Christmas Eve,” not “Christmas Night.” Nit-picky to the max, I know, but still! It’s taking place the night before Christmas. I will also take a little credit myself here and say that I found the words of the song to be puzzling the first time I heard it, even before I knew the original title, because there seemed to be a muddle about who’s being addressed. The child who is being sung to sleep is told to “hear the Master calling” and reminded that “the Shepherd calls his little lambs.” It seems clear that the Master and Shepherd titles refer to someone other than the child, right? That’s the way I read it, anyway.

What Can We Learn from a Taciturn Star?

November 2, 2020September 9, 2017 by debisimons

I have been absolutely salivating at the idea of sinking my teeth into this Frost poem. We tend to associate Frost with his familiar and simple poems: “Stopping by Woods,” “The Road Not Taken,” and perhaps “Mending Wall.” Even those poems can be mined for deeper meaning, but when you get to some of his other ones, well! You (or perhaps I) can go on just about forever.

Should Dan Forrest’s Three Nocturnes Inspire Us to Look Up at the Stars?

February 24, 2022September 2, 2017 by debisimons

Um, I guess so. I’m going to try, anyway.

I’ve had the great privilege of singing this work with my own choir, the Cherry Creek Chorale. We loved it! (So did the audience.) All three parts of the Nocturnes have lyrics from American poems, and I’m going to take a stab at clarifying them. As I’ve said this before, though, taking a poem apart to pry out the meaning is a little bit like explaining a joke: when you’re all done, you’ve destroyed the original. Still, there are some intriguing lines in all three selections that repay analysis. If you’d rather leave the mystery intact, you can skip the following.

Why Is Randall Thompson’s “Alleluia” So Mournful?

December 12, 2020March 3, 2017 by debisimons

Isn’t the word “alleluia” supposed to be a shout of joy?

First, the occasion: the opening of the Berkshire Music Center at Tanglewood. Let’s see–”Tanglewood” is the summer home of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, an outdoor concert venue in rural Massachusetts. The Berkshire facility (which at some point was renamed as the Tanglewood Music Center) opened in 1940 under the leadership of Serge Koussevitsky, the BSO’s music director at the time. The Tanglewood venue had been active for three years, and Koussevitsky saw an opportunity to expand the facility into a summer music camp for students. He decided to commission a piece by an American composer for the student body to perform at the opening ceremonies.

The Story of Eric Whitacre’s “Sleep”

August 24, 2024February 18, 2017 by debisimons

In a sense, Mr. Whitacre has already done my work for me. You can read the charming story of his writing this piece to the words of the Robert Frost poem “Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening” and then finding out that the poem was no longer available for use, putting the song “under his bed,” and then getting his friend Charles Silvestri to write new lyrics, by going to his website and reading the story here. I’ll give you just a taste here to whet your appetite for the whole thing:

This was an enormous task, because I was asking him to not only write a poem that had the exact structure of the Frost, but that would even incorporate key words from “Stopping,” like ‘sleep.’ Tony wrote an absolutely exquisite poem, finding a completely different (but equally beautiful) message in the music I had already written. I actually prefer Tony’s poem now.

What on earth are the “mournful numbers” in “A Psalm of Life”?

March 21, 2022September 19, 2016 by debisimons

When contemporary composer John Muehleisen set Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s poem “A Psalm of Life” to music, he knew that the poet was not talking about actual weeping numbers in the first line, perhaps a number 7 with tears dripping from the end of the top bar. No. Here the word “number” means a piece, selection, or verse. When we refer to the songs in a Broadway show, for instance, we often call them “number,.” as in “a showstopping song-and-dance number.” Therefore, if we piece together the title, “A Psalm of Life,” the subtitle, “What the heart of the young man said to the Psalmist,” and the first two lines (“Tell me not in mournful numbers/Life is but an empty dream”), we get a message of hope, optimism, and action.