From the Hearts of Women: A Song Cycle
by William Grant Still
Notes by Ruth Robertson
Best known for his orchestral works (five symphonies and over a dozen other lengthy orchestral works), African-American composer William Grant Still also composed extensively for the human voice: nine operas, many choral pieces, and many vocal solos and duets.
In this last category, there are six published volumes of William Grant Still works for vocal solos and duets with piano accompaniment. These include three columns of Arias, Duets and Scenes from William Grant Still Operas; An Art Song Collection; and two song cycles: Songs of Separation and, with the release of this present volume, From the Hearts of Women. Many of the songs included in these collections and several other titles are also published as single works accompanied either by piano or by various instrumental ensembles.
Composed in 1959, the four songs in From the Hearts of Women stand in sharp contrast to those from Still’s other song cycle Songs of Separation, composed in 1949. For the earlier cycle Still employed texts by five male poets to describe the various emotions of a person at the end of a romantic relationship. While only two of the five poems are from specifically male perspective, when sung together as a set the entire cycle can be thought of as the emotional outpouring of one tormented man when his lady love leaves him. The songs feature mostly through-composed, arching, wide ranging, and emotionally intense melodies, painted with a wide brush and bold colors.
For the lyrics of his second cycle Still turned to a woman, his wife Verna Arvey, for a description of the feminine emotional landscape. She takes a “verbal snap shot” of four very different women of various ages. In Songs of Separation, five men describe the anguish of one man. In From the Hearts of Women, one woman paints sketches of four very different women. The first three songs of the second cycle are mostly sectional, reserved, and wispy, sparkling, somewhat like minimalist paintings with repetitious bright patterns splashed on the canvas.
The method of composition was different for both cycles: for his 1949 cycle, Still used pre-existing poems and set them to music. But he and his wife worked together on his second cycle. Their daughter Judith Anne Still described their collaboration:
His method was to outline the text that he wanted to my mother, and she would fit the word to his concept, and to his initial sketch of the piece. They worked on the ideas of the poems together — my father was not putting music to her poems, as far as I know. That is how they usually worked, as they did with operas. My father probably made notes for the poems, and my mother worked from his notes (from an e-mail sent in May 2004).
It is fortunate for singers and their teachers that, while busy composing his third symphony and other works, Still took time out to collaborate with his pianist/journalist/librettist wife to produce this gem of a song cycle entitled From the Hearts of Women.
Knoxville: Summer of 1915, op. 24
by Samuel Barber
Notes by Chris Myers
The beginning of 1947 was a difficult time for Samuel Barber. He was happy to have returned to civilian life after his wartime service, but his father and aunt were both in failing health. That January, he encountered James Agee’s Knoxville: Summer of 1915, a short essay which would eventually become the preamble to the author’s Pulitzer Prize-winning A Death in the Family. Agee’s poignant look back at his childhood struck a chord with Barber, and when soprano Eleanor Steber commissioned a work from him in February, he immediately decided to set it to music. The piece came to him very quickly and was completed on April 4.
James Agee’s essay is a dreamy, conversational, almost improvisatory piece of prose reflecting on summers spent with his family at their home in Tennessee. The author claimed that he wrote the stream-of-consciousness text in less than 90 minutes and made only minor revisions to it once it was complete. In the course of the essay, Agee shifts between viewing the world as an adult and seeing it through the eyes of his five-year-old self. He affectionately describes his parents and his artist uncle and musician aunt, both of whom were very close to him. While the text superficially yearns for the “golden years”, it is suffused with an inescapable adult knowledge of the frailty of life. Written in 1938, with the world on the verge of the Second World War, and reflecting back to 1915, when the nation was struggling to avoid the First World War, Agee seems eager to cling to innocence as long as possible even while recognizing the inevitability of its loss.
The text resonated strongly with Steber, who commented, “That was exactly my childhood in Wheeling, West Virginia.” For his part, Barber was struck by the uncanny similarity between his and Agee’s childhood: both were five years old in 1915 and were raised by loving parents and an artistic aunt and uncle (for Barber, the composer Sidney Homer and contralto Louise Homer). The composer later wrote to his uncle, “It reminded me so much of summer evenings in West Chester, now very far away, and all of you are in it.” Barber’s Aunt Louise would pass away on May 6, 1947. His father, to whom the composer dedicated Knoxville, followed on August 12.
The piece begins with a theme that we will come to associate with the comfort of home. A gentle triplet figure in the orchestra brings to mind the image of rocking chairs on the porch, mirroring the text’s description of people “rocking gently and talking gently.” Throughout Knoxville: Summer of 1915, Barber looks to the text for his melodic cues in this way, using word painting to create atmosphere and emphasize words. We hear the horses’ “hollow iron music on the asphalt”, and the unhurried pace of passersby “talking casually” is reflected in the singer’s delivery of the words.
Knoxville’s structure closely follows the free, dreamlike flow of Agee’s prose. The composer referred to the resulting piece as a “lyric rhapsody”, and it can roughly be described in rondo form, with the tranquility of childhood memories interrupted by two episodes.
First, the gentle and casual evening is disrupted by the clattering onomatopoetic modernity of “a streetcar raising its iron moan, stopping, belling and starting, stertorous.” The orchestra moans, bells, and growls along, and the sparks and “iron whine” are given musical portrayal which slowly fades as the streetcar passes. As the narrator’s father appears to drain and coil the garden hose, we can still hear it fading into the distance.
We return to the opening image of people rocking and talking on the porch. This time, though, it’s no longer abstract people, but the narrator’s parents. As the family gathers together to lie on quilts in the backyard, Agee’s mind wanders, and the comfort of the “home” theme is interrupted again — this time by a slow recognition of mortality. As we meet each member of the family, the music grows in intensity, mirroring the author’s affection for his uncle and aunt, father and mother. The melody crescendos to a heartfelt plea that God will “bless my people, my uncle, my aunt, my mother, my good father…” in trouble and at their death, and we realize that the music of the introduction was, in fact, a foreshadowing of this climactic benediction.
The gentle rocking theme returns and attempts to regain the innocent happiness with which it began, but it never quite manages. It does, however, achieve a calm acceptance which seems both more profound and more fulfilling. This soliloquy, which began as a naïve and blissful remembrance of the golden years of childhood, ends with acknowledgement of the frailty of life and the realization that, while home may always be welcoming and comforting, it “will not, not now, not ever; but will not ever tell me who I am.”
Pictures at an Exhibition
by Modest Mussorgsky/Maurice Ravel
Notes by Malcom MacDonald
In 1873 Mussorgsky was deeply affected by the death of his great friend Victor Hartmann, a painter and architect. The following year an exhibition of Hartmann’s work inspired Mussorgsky to write Pictures at an Exhibition. Unpublished until after his death in 1881, it was by far his most important composition for piano solo. Ten pictures, illustrated in separate movements, are connected by the Promenade, a theme which leads us through the gallery from one picture to the next. In these pieces, Mussorgsky had produced a new style of piano writing which deeply influenced later composers. In addition, the chordal textures have tempted others to arrange the work for orchestra. Ravel’s orchestration, completed in 1922, is by far the best known, and the pièce de resistance of a master orchestrator.
The piece begins with the Promenade, a formal and somewhat ponderous theme with a pronounced Russian character. It recurs after movements 1, 2, and 4, its uneven metre seeming to depict the portly Mussorgsky as he moved from picture to picture. The sequence is as follows:
Gnomus. The music depicts a gnome running on crooked legs (Hartmann’s picture was a design for a gnome-shaped nutcracker).
Il Vecchio Castello (“The Old Castle”). A troubadour sings before a medieval castle. Here Ravel gives the main melody to the saxophone.
Tuileries. This depicts the Paris gardens, bustling with nursemaids and squabbling children.
Bydlo. A polish ox-cart rolls along on enormous wheels. Ravel gives the melody to the tuba, creating a renowned solo for that instrument.
Ballet des Poussins dans leur Coques (Ballet of Chicks in their Shells”). Hartmann’s picture shows sketches of some costume designs for a ballet.
Samuel Goldenberg und Schmuyle. This is a double portrait based on two pictures of Polish Jews by Hartmann. Musically, one is arrogant and austere with an oriental Hassidic flavour, the other is pathetic with its importunate whining repeated notes. Ravel’s superbly effective realization of the latter is a virtuoso display of triple-tonguing for muted trumpet.
Limoges – Le Marché (“Limoges – The Market Place”). The French market-woman in this clatteringly rhythmic piece are said to be gossiping about a lost cow, a drunken neighbor and some false teeth.
Catacombae: Sepulchrum Romanum. Hartmann depicts himself probing the mysteries of the Roman tombs by the light of a lantern. In the section that follows, Cum Mortuis in Lingua Mortua, Mussorgsky figuratively picks up the lantern and continues the quest with a spectral, quasi-religious transformation of the Promenade tune.
La Cabane sur des Pattes de Poule (“The Hut on Fowl’s Legs”). This is a brilliant grotesque march. Hartmann designed a clock in the form of the hut in which dwelt the mythical witch of Russian folklore, Baba-Yaga.
La Grande Porte de Kiev (“The Great Gate of Kiev”). This design was commissioned in 1866 but was never built. Hartmann’s gate was in ancient Russian style, with a cupola shaped like a Slavic war helmet. Mussorgky’s finale, based on a triumphant variant of the Promenade theme, is also “in ancient Russian style” and brings the suite to a conclusion with a pealing bell-effects (enthusiastically interpreted by Ravel) that recall the coronation pageantry of the composer’s opera Boris Godunov.