Who are the two heavy hitters involved in the light, shimmering piece “A Boy and a Girl”?

And they are: Eric Whitacre, one of today’s most popular American composers of classical choral music, and Octavio Paz, Nobel-Prize-winning poet, essayist and diplomat. Quite a team!

Let’s start with Paz and his poem. While the title’s translation from the original Spanish is typically rendered as “A Boy and a Girl,” I ran into an interesting blog post that had this to say:

As a side note, the title “Los Novios” is very difficult to translate into English without losing something. The word “novio” means a boyfriend or a romantic partner and comes from the Latin novus, or new. The feminine form “novia” means the same thing, and in Spanish, if there are multiples in a group consisting of females and males, the plural word takes the masculine plural. While “los novios” could be translated as “the boyfriends,” context here is clear that it is the sum of a boyfriend and a girlfriend and not some sort of homoerotic message. Because “The Boyfriend and the Girlfriend” is an awkward title, I took the liberty of translating the title as “The Lovers,” which seems to me to capture the essence of what Paz was trying to convey. (from “The Lovers”: A New Translation of Octavio Paz’ “Los Novios”)

You can find a number of possible meanings assigned to the poem; before I go on, since it’s so short, let me include it here in the translation from the above-quoted source. It’s a more literal reading than the standard one by Muriel Rukeyser used in Whitacre’s piece. I’ll include the Spanish version at the end of this post along with the Rukeyser version and let you decide for yourself which one you like best:

Lying in the grass
a girl and a boy.
Eating oranges, exchanging kisses
like the waves exchanging their foam.

Lying on the beach
a girl and a boy.
Eating limes, exchanging kisses
like the clouds exchanging foam.

Lying underground
a girl and a boy.
Saying nothing, nor kissing
exchanging silence for silence.

A couple of questions immediately present themselves: 1) Why are waves mentioned in the context of the couple’s lying in the grass and not when they’re lying on the beach? 2) Do clouds even have foam?

I’m going to go w-a-a-a-y out on a limb here and propose that there’s the progression of a romantic relationship contained in these three short verses.

The first stage, with the eating of oranges symbolizing that initial gratification. (“Eating” has a sexual connotation in Mexico, as in many other cultures.) Their mutual exchange is symbolized by waves, something substantial, but they themselves, and by extension their relationship, are hidden in the grass.

The second stage, with the oranges now having turned to limes, a sweet fruit to a sour one. They’re out in the open, on the beach, but their relationship is now much more fragile than it was—clouds instead of waves. Paz used clouds to symbolize “an awareness of dissolution,” as they are a tenuous balance of water and air. Perhaps the Spanish word for foam, “espumas,” is being used in one of its secondary meanings, as “froth” or even “aerosol.” Note also that in this verse the word “their” is omitted from the phrase “exchanging foam”; I checked the original Spanish wording and it’s the same there. An element of the personal is now gone between the two.

The third stage, with no kisses at all and with the lovers being “underground.” It’s probably too facile to say that they’re both dead and more appropriate to see them as having become immobilized and isolated, with no more kisses and no more open air, just silence.

That’s how I see it, anyway. The meaning can’t really be boiled down to any one set of ideas, though, for this poem or indeed for any other one. Otherwise, why write the poem? Perhaps no better overall commentary can be made than the statement from Eric Whitacre himself: “’A Boy and a Girl’ is such a tender, delicate, exquisite poem; I simply tried to quiet myself as much as possible and find the music hidden within the words.” He goes on to say, “I’m often asked which of my compositions is my favorite. I don’t really have one that I love more than the others, but I do feel that the four measures that musically paint the text ‘never kissing’ may be the truest notes I’ve ever written.” (“A Boy and a Girl”)

To me, the word “shimmering.” seems a good way to describe the piece as a whole. The music echoes the images of clouds, waves and foam and would make great background music for an Impressionist painting exhibition. I’m a sucker for all things impressionistic, so even though I’d never heard of Eric Whitacre when my choir started rehearsing this piece for a May 2014 concert I was all up for it. As I recall, there was some banter about Whitacre’s good looks and the fact that he’d been a male model early in his career just to put food on the table. And someone asked, “What does ‘exchanging foam’ mean?” to which our assistant conductor replied, “Nothing I want my daughter involved in.” Ah, such memories.

Whitacre is known for his dissonances; at one point in rehearsals we were told, “That’s a Whitacre chord.” While he does have his critics, on the whole he’s seen as a great positive force in today’s choral music. And of course he’s the one who pioneered the “virtual choir,” without which we’d be much the poorer during this time of COVID-19. I’m writing this post in January of 2021; we are all hoping to be back in regular rehearsals by the fall, but for now the virtual format is giving us a great outlet. Thank you, Eric!

Here’s a fabulous performance by the group VOCES8. I discovered them by accident bopping around on YouTube and have posted their videos before, saying then as I say now that it’s amazing how much sound these eight great voices can produce. The translation used in this performance starts each verse with the word “stretched.” Note how that word is used musically in each written verse and also the dynamics, with the second verse, where the boy and girl are out in the open, being the loudest and most dramatic. Someone has noted that the closing wordless and hummed verse is just as important and full of meaning as the others, and I think that’s true. Whitacre has added to the Paz poem with a sort of epilogue that implies an endless silence.