Art Songs Archives - Page 5 of 6

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.

How Has Frost’s “The Road Not Taken” Been Misinterpreted?

February 27, 2021September 12, 2016 by debisimons

My son the English major has pointed out that the way “The Road Not Taken” is usually interpreted is just wrong. How many posters, and e-mail sign-offs, and titles of sophomore term papers say “Take the road less traveled” or “I took the road less traveled” or “Be your own person; take the less-traveled road” or whatever? The poem is seen as a paean to independence and freedom, to being your own person. But folks, that ain’t what it says at all!

What’s the Destination in “Song of the Open Road”?

December 11, 2020August 29, 2016 by debisimons

Short answer: It’s not the destination but the journey. (You’ve read that on a poster somewhere, haven’t you?)

First some information on Norman Dello Joio (whom I was at first confusing with Ola Gjello). Dello Joio had a fascinating life and career. He was descended from an Italian family known for producing church organists, and he himself became one at age fourteen at the St. Mary Star of the Sea church in the Bronx. (Isn’t that a cool name for church? If you’d like to read an explanation of why Mary would be associated with this title, go to my post here.) His father was a teacher and performer, and his childhood was full of music and also musical glamour, as some of his father’s voice students were from the Metropolitan Opera and would arrive for their lessons in their Rolls Royces. Dello Joio was given a scholarship to Julliard and then went on to graduate studies there, ultimately deciding that he didn’t want to spend the rest of his life in church organ lofts. Instead he pursued a career as a composer, studying composition in 1941 with the great German composer Paul Hindemith at Yale. (Hindemith had emigrated to the US from Germany in 1940.) Hindemith encouraged Dello Joio to remember that his (that is, DJ’s) music was “lyrical by nature.” Dello Joio said that he hadn’t understood Hindemith’s statement at the time but realized later that he meant, “Don’t sacrifice necessarily to a system, go to yourself, what you hear. If it’s valid, and it’s good, put it down in your mind. Don’t say I have to do this because the system tells me to. No, that’s a mistake.” (This information is from the Dello Joio official website; you can read more about his life by going here.) Dello Joio went on to have an extremely successful career as a composer, with his latest work dating to 2003, five years before his death, when he was ninety.

A Charming Fable that Deserves More Fame

December 11, 2020March 16, 2016 by debisimons

Statue of Apollo

The secular cantata A God in Disguise by the Swedish composer Lars-Erik Larsson with lyrics by the poet Hjalmar Gullberg is a fabulous work that is far too little known here in America. There are two ideas about its background that I’d like to discuss in this post: the actual story behind the lyrics and world events that were unfolding at the time of its composition.

How does this whole commissioning process work?

January 3, 2022January 31, 2016 by debisimons

Note to readers: This post was originally written in connection with a March 2016 concert by my own choir. I have left it as is, since it contains quite a bit of information about how commissions work and therefore should be of general interest.

So I started out by saying that we (that is, the Cherry Creek Chorale in the Denver area) had a number of commissioned pieces on our program for this concert, which raised the question above. So how does it all work?

Well, it depends. If I were to commission a wall hanging by a local artist to put in the stairwell of my home, that original physical item would belong to me. Beyond that ownership, though, there could be a number of permutations. I would have to spell out what other rights I wanted to purchase along with the item itself: Would I own the rights to the image or design? Could I make prints or copies of it and sell them? Would I have to give credit to the artist any time that a picture of my home was published that included the stairwell? Etc. It’s a very interesting and complicated issue.

Can the Lyrics in Our Set of “Birder” Pieces Be Explained?

December 11, 2020January 25, 2016 by debisimons

I will start out this post by quoting myself (how’s that for arrogance?) from what I wrote about the William Agee poem “This Shining Night” from a previous Christmas concert: “Poetry isn’t supposed to be an art form that can be reduced to simple explanations; otherwise, why write the poem at all? Just explain what you’re trying to say in a clear, concise paragraph and forget the versifying.” You can enjoy the imagery and wit in these four short lyrics without having any explanation or context. But if you’re like me, you’ll appreciate the words much more if you have some sort of context for them. I was very fortunate to find an article from The Guardian newspaper in its “poem of the week” column that makes various meanings clear without trying to take out all the mystery. I’d highly recommend reading it. (You can also read the poems in their entirety there. They are of course copyrighted, so I am including only short extracts below with the kind permission of the author, Gwyneth Lewis, and her publisher, Bloodaxe Books. Wouldn’t you just love to know how they came up with the name of that publisher? I don’t see any explanation on their website.)

Eric Whitacre’s Sweet Seal Lullaby

December 11, 2020November 23, 2015 by debisimons

Note to readers: This post originally was originally written in reference to a Christmas concert by my own choir; thus the holiday reference.

Why are we singing a lullaby to a seal? Are seals somehow part of the Christmas story?

Let’s get the connection between seals (the animals) and Christmas out of the way first. There isn’t one. So that’s settled. (There are Christmas seals of another type,, though—remember those? The little stamps with holiday themes that you’d stick on the envelope flap of your Christmas cards? They’re issued by the American Lung Association and have been around since 1907, when the main push was to find a cure for tuberculosis. As I revise this post in the fall of 2020 they’ve shifted focus to COVID-19. You can still order them and also post them digitally to Facebook, etc.)