On Performing

Beginnings

A prepubescent boy of 12 bathed in dazzling stage lights in 1973 sings Norman Dello Joio’s 1948 setting There is a Lady Sweet and Kind accompanied at the piano by his fearsome teacher, a man named Wallace Tomchek, at some rural high school in Wisconsin for three non-descript oldsters checking off boxes without looking up until the end when it is revealed that one is weeping.

In the beginning, performance is what you make of it. In the end, when you finally become what a lifetime of performing has made of you, you’ve become a means of transmission, an instrument. In between comes the performing. And the bear. More about the bear later.

Public Performing: the ritual for which one dresses up (or not) in concert blacks, hits the deck, and participates as performer or auditor in a transformative exercise facilitated by music-making, is undeniably an opportunity to enjoy and explore peak human and aesthetic experiences that, in their rightness, touch peoples’ souls and enrich their lives.

Christmas 1978, as a tenor in the choir during a recording session of, among other seasonal pieces, Holst’s Lullay My Liking I am moved to secret tears of gratitude and joy by the sudden, staggering understanding of how very much I love all the people with whom I am singing, that we are good and that, no matter where everyone’s paths will take them after graduation, we can take gentle, youthful pride in our performances; that our conductor Kay is excellent, and that she and Tomchek have taught us well; that this is a memory, a peak moment, if I can hold on to it, an instant that, if correctly remembered and left unadorned, might help carry me into the future.

Listening to the recording just now, I can still identify individual voices in that long ago chorus, and I am transported in time to who I was then, able to examine the skein of memories that ties the man I am and the boy I was in a way that consoles and admonishes, celebrates and memorializes.  Memory is what makes us human; it is the Madeleine. But it is performance that activates memory and compels us to act.

Private Performing: composer (and former chef) Carlos Jaquez Gonzalez observed to me during filming of the operafilm 9/10: Love Before the Fall (in which he sang the role of Tony) how alike Family Meal in the restaurant world, chamber music with friends, and ensemble building in the theater are. I have leaned into that with my New Mercury Collective.

I am with stolid deliberation working my way through a new French language edition of Marcel Proust’s À la recherché du temps perdu — a gift from the Camargo Foundation’s resident director, Michael Pretina — side by side with my mother’s nicotine-stained 1934 English language edition. It is November 1989. The Mistral is marching stiffly down the Alps and sweeping across the Côte d’Azur on its way to North Africa, so I am wrapped in jeans and a shocking pink woolen Benetton sweater purchased a few weeks earlier in Venice with money I don’t really have and in which I have sweated. It still looks good, but it smells a little funky. A few days earlier I had set Paul Muldoon’s poem Holy Thursday to music, and have volunteered to perform it, along with a few other songs—some Barber, Rorem, Bernstein, and a couple of my own—at a soiree Michael is throwing for some donors. I can hear the rhythmic crashing of the waves on the limestone cliffs below the villa and, on a lark,  synchronize to them the thrumming chords of the piano part of my setting of Paul’s poem. As I play for an instant I realize the moment for what it is.

The riskiest performing of all, the ultimate gift that performers can offer one another, is the sharing of unfinished drafts or unpolished performances. Complete trust and inclusion of others in one’s creative space. As a composer who performs, mine is the music room at Yaddo, the artist retreat in Saratoga Springs, New York.

Sitting next to David Del Tredici, giddily charging through Mozart Symphonies four handed arms like spaghetti on a summer afternoon in the early 90s; David accompanying me as I roughhouse my way through Now You Know — a song with words by Antler and dedicated to me about, among other things, how male babies in the womb get erections, and how many, and how often — to a roaring audience of guests in summer 1998; David’s exquisite accompaniment as I sing my setting of Gardner McFall’s Amelia’s Song in September 2005 for the rest of the guests after dinner while composing the opera; accompanying Gilda Lyons myself in my arrangement of the hymn Angel Band before dinner during an annual board meeting sometime during the aughts; weeping, a few days after Ray Charles’ death in 2004, while singing and playing my setting of Stephen Dunn’s Elegy for Ray Charles (were Stephen or David aware yet that they had Parkinson’s?) for him in the middle of the night.

I may have thought that I was a pianist, singer, or conductor before I landed in conservatory, but that nonsense was knocked out of me the first time I walked down the second-floor hallway at Curtis lined with the sepia-colored group graduation photos (of Gary Graffman, Jorge Bolet, Leonard Rose, Jaime Laredo and…) to the sound of kids younger than me crushing repertoire that I’d never have the technique to perform. From that moment on, I thought of myself as “a composer who plays the piano,” despite all the piano lessons and some really terrific teachers, with whom I am grateful to have studied — beginning at 7 with a stern Polish Holocaust survivor named Adam Klescewski; then Duane Dishaw at the Wisconsin Conservatory of Music; and then Jeannette Ross at the University of Wisconsin; ending with Marion Zarzeczna, a pupil of Horszowski’s, at Curtis, who taught me finally how to not play “like a composer.”

Just as composing requires a safe, secure space from whence to create, performing requires that you feel safe onstage. Every one of my teachers observed with wonder how comfortable and at ease I was at the keyboard. It was because, when I was fifteen my mother made my father promise that, if I were at the piano, then he could not summon me to perform any of the numerous random tasks that he demanded of all three of his sons when he was home in what we decided was a conscious desire to keep us from relaxing. For me, the result was that the moment I took to the bench I felt safe. In performance, charged with lifting up and protecting a singer, I was always and have remained, entirely in command of myself as a performer because I’m not there for me: I am a man on a mission.

I made the most of the technique that I had. I performed on hundreds of concerts as a collaborative pianist, made records, coached, and put over from the piano a dozen operas to collaborators, producers, and colleagues. I’ve always acknowledged my place. After hearing me premiere some songs with Douglas Hines, Vladimir Sokoloff told me, “You’re a fine collaborative pianist. Soloist not so much.” I am grateful for that.

Middles

Procedural memory is a crucial aspect of being an effective performer. That’s why one practices scales, which, aside from keeping one physically limber (more about that later), create a wealth of repetitive motions that can be executed without conscious management, increasing suppleness of execution, improving one’s technical precision, and even storing history itself in the retained motor skills.

Teachers transfer their muscle memory to their students by passing along to them their personal fingerings. This practical aspect of the oral tradition has a lot of history and poetry to it. Consider that Tchaikovsky was assisted by his composition student Iosef Kotek (a violinist) who provided practical advice that helped his teacher make the solo part more idiomatic. Tchaikovsky offered the piece to Leopold Auer, who rejected it (a ding the piece had to overcome in order to get legs), so the premiere went to Adolph Brodsky; but then Auer picked it up later and passed along his fingerings and interpretation to his students—Elman, Heifetz, Milstein, Shumsky, and Zimbalist, among others.

Hmmmm, that’s nice. No wonder the celli sound so plump there, I muse, hearing a bass clarinet doubling hitherto buried in the orchestration. Looking and sounding good during a rehearsal of Gershwin’s I Got Rhythm Variations with JoAnn Falletta and the Denver Chamber Orchestra in 1987, I’ve relaxed just enough during some passagework to let my mind wander. Up I go, my fingers rattling on by muscle memory, hearing things I’m not supposed to be hearing because I am not listening to myself. Even in the moment I am thinking “this is so cool” until I notice JoAnn glancing at me and I plunge back down into my own brain.

In the operafilm I Hear America Singing I have the composer wonder, “Where do people go when they go ‘up?’ Is it heaven?” If the moment of silence between the final sound and the first clap is where the bear lives (more about him later), then I think that the spirit of whomever composed the piece might live “up there,” with angels like Wenders’ Damien and Cassiel, observing and remembering. That’s why I’ve never “gone up” while performing my own music. If I ever do go up playing my own music, who will I meet there?

Sometime in the aughts a pianist colleague who had never heard me play turned to me just as I was about to go onstage to perform some songs with Paul Sperry on a benefit concert at Alice Tully Hall and said, “Please just don’t play like a composer, okay?” Performers aren’t angels; colleagues can be real stinkers. On the one hand, the legitimate criticisms that recreative musicians have with creators arise from the fact that, when we perform, we’re not listening critically. We’re too used to filling in the blanks, to imagining the stuff that is missing; too interested in the sweep of the argument to be careful about the notes. On the other hand, the anecdote reminds me that, over the course of three decades, Paul taught hundreds of singers at Aspen, Juilliard, Manhattan School, and elsewhere, how he and I preferred (with great exactitude) to perform the dozens of songs that I wrote for us. So I guess I am part of a tradition, after all.

Afternoons every couple of months with Paul Sperry over the years in his studio at the Majestic on Central Park West in New York City reading through the stacks of song cycles that composers sent him, enjoying the adventure, the challenge, the overview of what was happening in the art song world, the bits of wisdom imparted, the thumbnail critiques of the vocal writing, the laughter, the wine, quite simply … the playing.

“Playing like a composer” is one thing. Among serious composers and pianists both there is a stigma attached to the ability to “put a song over” at the keyboard — what composer Tevi Eber reminds me is dismissed as playing like a “theater pianist.” It happens that I am very good at it, though I stopped doing it when arthritis made performing more painful than it was worth. When he first landed in New York City in the early 40s, Leonard Bernstein did some work arranging, transcribing, and notating jazz improvisations for Harms under the pseudonym Lenny Amber. (I did the same thing, for another publisher, during the late 80s.) Distancing oneself from “hack work” is one thing, but LB was a super-practical musician, and proud of the fact that he could “put over” his shows “the way that Marc [Blitzstein] did.”

Putting over Frank Lloyd Wright’s “Balsam fir” aria from Shining Brow for Lenny on his beautiful Baldwin at the Dakota in 1990, knowing it was good stuff; the absolute I-can’t-believe-this-is-happening thrill of hearing him channel my compositional voice and manipulate it without corrupting it, singing and playing through the same material in his gravelly-schmoozy voice, and by doing so, teaching.

The only way I can perform my own music effectively is to convince myself that I didn’t write it. If I can manage that, then I derive tremendous satisfaction from performing with musicians who are interesting to listen to, who never sing or play anything the same way twice, and who require my backup because they are all in and anything could happen.

Orson Welles captures perfectly the effect that performing the same piece in different venues and for different audiences either on tour or over the span of decades feels like to me in the funhouse mirror sequence of The Lady from Shanghai. “Of course, killing you is killing myself,” says Everett Sloane, aiming his pistol at Rita Hayworth, who he sees in reflection with her gun aimed at him, along with his own face. “It’s the same thing. But, you know, I’m pretty tired of both of us.” Every shot that rings out causes another reflected version of Sloane, Welles, and Hayworth to shatter into a million pieces. I’ve had this experience in my own small way with songs like Holy Thursday, which I’ve played, sung and accompanied hundreds of times in different situations. I can’t imagine how Anne-Sophie Mutter or Joshua Bell feel performing the Beethoven Violin Concerto in the hundredth city, or Paul McCartney performing Hey Jude, but I’d make an operafilm about it in a hot New York minute.

Because I came to music first as a singer — that prepubescent boy of 12 bathed in dazzling stage lights in 1973 — I’ve always been entirely at ease as a choral conductor. Hartzell, Tomchek, and Robert Fountain were excellent role models, and I’d been doing it without effort for years by the time Louis Karchin engaged me as his assistant with the Washington Square Chorus at New York University (an interesting bunch comprised of NYU students and community members) during the late 80s and early 90s. When I took over as music director, we had a run of several years during which I joyously deepened my appreciation and love of exploring the rapturously singable part writing of  Monteverdi and Gesualdo by teaching them, week after week; picking up the stick to conduct Mozart — all the great repertoire I had been gifted to sing growing up.

Like most composers, I’ve been called upon to serve as conductor for various reasons, with ensembles large and small, fairly often over the years. I had excellent teachers: Catherine Comet was both terrifying and inspiring; and the help that I got from Lukas made me a respectable technician. Because I’ve only conducted when I needed to, I cannot in good conscience consider myself a conductor.

Stepping off the podium in Milwaukee and shaking the concertmaster’s hand after conducting Suite for a Lonely City— music that, via Bernstein, landed me on the east coast — in 1978 and intuiting that it was the beginning of something; bowing to Norman’s grieving parents in the little balcony in Curtis Hall after conducting the one and only performance of the memorial symphony I wrote for Norman in 1983, crushingly aware of the callow impertinence of my gesture; the feeling of disenchanted vindication I had when stepping off the podium in Las Vegas after having gotten my opera Bandanna in the can in 2000; thirty-eight years after looking down into the faces of my teenage contemporaries and feeling atop Mount Pisgah at the beginning of my story in Milwaukee, leading my fifty-something contemporaries and Gilda Lyons — in music that Bernstein once wrote as a young man for Tourel  — on my birthday in 2016 in Philadelphia, relieved that it would probably be my last time on the podium.

Ends

Once Tin Pan Alley gave way to broadcast pop, songs usually ended by repeating the chorus or the hook while the music faded out, facilitating crossfades on the radio and enabling the band to improvise solos on the “ride out.” Odd how songs just end again in the Internet era. Most importantly, fade outs avoided the dreaded “full stop.” Full stops are downers. Full. Stop. See what I mean?

Transitions are where development and drama happen. Anybody who spins a narrative on some sort of timeline fusses with the transitions between set pieces, the reasoning being that, if you allow an audience to applaud, they’ve been released from the moment and must be pulled back in and their disbelief resuspended. “Exit, pursued by a bear” — the all-time greatest stage direction.

Concert music generally comes to a full stop (either it ends “up” or “down”) when the piece is finished. As a performer one hopes to have been so much in the moment that one’s behavior at the double bar is too crass a thing to consider, just as composers suppose — correctly or not — that the audience will be moved to reflect on what has just transpired and that their anticipation of the opportunity to express their appreciation will mount during whatever silence follows the last note. In that space lives the bear.

Seated at the piano in Curtis Hall in Philadelphia in April 1984, finishing the world premiere of a big song cycle called Three Silent Things, the performance of which would mark my last appearance as a student on that stage, looking up from my finger on the A key as the pitch decayed first at Rob’s face, hearing the B of his cello, then at Lisa’s face, hearing the D of her viola, and then Michaela’s as she held the F# on her violin, and finally at Karen as she sang, “this shallow spectacle, this sense,” on the tonic, I understood for the first time that Wallace Stevens’ poem A Clear Day and No Memories, which I had read as an elegiac, innig meditation on mortality, was in fact a clinical description of existential emptiness, the loss of love, and the end of memory. After I nodded the final cutoff of that simple Gmaj9#7 chord, it felt as though the silence that followed stretched on and on. I hadn’t until that moment had the conscious self-awareness to accept that we were all basically quits, and that, although our narratives would of course continue, they would diasporate.

At that moment, I was eaten by the bear. I was genuinely unprepared for the emptiness, the sense of loss, of, well, what Karen had just been singing about, to feel so viscerally awful. In this place a performer hears not one beat of applause, one word of congratulations; feels not one hug, smells not a single flower in the bouquet that has appeared in one’s hands. Stage Managers are the caretakers of this liminal space, guiding otherwise capable people past the bear and into and out of the wings, gently but firmly telling them to walk slowly or to rush. The bear has a huge repertoire: the imposter syndrome, performance anxiety, the fear of being deemed unworthy, judged, all the feels; for some performers, the hardest part is never having come to terms with the fact that there will never be enough applause, and that the Real World is still out there past the bear, waiting.

Making myself as small as I can at the piano in Philadelphia, sometime in fall 1982, I am aware that I am not here to perform, but to witness. Periodically, I am called upon to play a few measures of accompaniment, but otherwise I am superfluous. I try to commit to memory everything that Szymon Goldberg is saying to my violinist friend during her lesson. He isn’t just passing along fingerings, bowing, style, bow speed and pressure, and tradition, he is summoning the aesthetic world in which Debussy lived for her and gently referencing for her the way that a half dozen other great violinists have played the piece — some for Debussy himself — so that, as she commits the great Sonata in G minor to memory she will inscribe it in her own poetic memory. As she puts her violin to her neck, the spirits of Gaston Poulet, who premiered it, David Oistrakh, who recorded it, and more join her.

“The Germans were advancing on Paris,” I recall Goldberg observing, “and you can feel the end of the world in it.” Like Messiaen’s Quatuor pour la fin du Temps, the Debussy Sonata captures in music some essential quorum of understanding of the actuality of the end of time. Even in my early 20s I appreciated the coolness of her hand in mine as we walked home together that fall evening, and how superficial my grasp of Debussy’s last piece was. Understanding it would require a lifetime of study and experience. “To think he died only a few months after writing it,” she mused. “But he left us some breadcrumbs at least,” I replied.

Ned and I have finished a couple of games of backgammon at the red dining room table in January 1999 the day after Jim died and I say, “I’ll throw together something to eat” and he pushes the board away, saying, “I’m going to play something.” His retreating back. I move to the kitchen. When I hear him playing and singing a Hoagy Carmichael song in the living room, I stop what I’m doing, bow my head, weep stupidly, and listen.

Performing is praying, lullay-ing, baying, and kyrie-ing. Sometimes it even involves playing. In the beginning there is the swaddling band and the infant’s reflexive whimper; then, the Whitmanesque song of oneself; at the end there is the winding sheet and the survivor’s keen. Or is it the other way around? William Blake’s “piping, loud” arrival; Dylan Thomas’ raging “against the dying of the light;” T.S. Eliot’s ending “with a whimper.” In the end, when you’ve finally become what a lifetime of performing has made of you, you’ve become a means of transmission, an instrument.

Thanksgiving 2017, I tease out the first few notes of Copland’s dignified, soulful setting of the great hymn Shall We Gather at the River, look up at my partner Gilda Lyons and wait, contentedly, for her to begin. She raises her hand slightly as she often does when she begins a song. I think of the countless times I’ve held that hand; I think about the anticipation of restoration, and how her love and acceptance has transformed my sorrows into joys. Together we perform.

Dormiveglia in Venice

First, the familiar ritual of crossing from the real world via the Ponte della Libertà to the Floating World; next, disembarking at Santa Lucia Station, thinking of the old violin professor’s farewell; finally, the people streaming down the graceful marble steps to the canal like water gushing in slow motion from a sluice. Limbo. At this point, stepping into any vaporetto, any ferryboat, will do: spoken Italian, German, Russian, very little English, the powerful, brutish diesel engine’s snarling as it is thrown into reverse, laughter trampolining off the water. I look up. Across the canal I see not a woman in a blue pea coat but a young girl in a white dress with a red ribbon holding an old man’s hand, her other hand shielding her eyes from the midday sun. Will I get off in Murano and visit the graves of Stravinsky, Nono, and Diaghilev at San Michele? Not this time; this time, only life in Venice. If a montage beat is notated in a screenplay with ellipses, then what is the musical equivalent?

The picture you always see on tourist websites: the Basilica della Salute. (p/c: Daron Hagen)

Welcome back then, to the transience of Venice; ave to its addiction to suggestibility; a nod to our old acquaintances misattribution, and the persistence of forgetting. A toast to memories receding and growing more untrustworthy — particularly here, where the sweat that pools at the base of your spine when you’re late, rushing, and lost feels like sickness, the hand pressing on your chest is not hot, but cold, infinitely patient and macabre. “Is this how this story ends?” you ask yourself just at the moment you’ve become pre-syncopal and you’re about to accept that you’re trapped in an M.C. Escher engraving where the tops and bottoms of the stairways meet up, the last of a dozen sunless, serpentine calles suddenly opens up to the Canal Grande and the full force of the sun hits you and you stop dead, you lose your place, the narrative derails, you go up, you hear something for the first time in the orchestra that you shouldn’t have because you’re not playing your assigned part, your clammy shirt seizes up around you like a moist, limp handshake, and you suddenly understand, after all these years, what Dylan Thomas meant when he wrote that “old age should burn and rave at close of day.”

Fondamente Nove. Not the acqua alta in which I saw stars but the bright blue sky, dazzling sun scattering diamonds on the Adriatic wave tips. Not cheap rye from a silent Acheron-type bartender on a cold, windy, rainy night, but a cappuccino on the house from the waiter at the charming café that has replaced it. Pointing to my phone: “è morto,” I tell him, drawing my finger across my throat. Then, I didn’t have a phone number; this time the phone (and its GPS) died on the vaporetto from Santa Lucia, forcing me to be here. This spot. “Prego?” he asks. “No. Grazie.” Not lire, but euros on the table in front of me. I pull out my book. This I must remember on my own.

The very light pressure I use when sketching with my lucky mechanical pencil. Deep breath. Very long exhalation. Eyes closed. Focus pull. First the faint, straight tic tac toe of a map, then, opening my eyes, I attach the names I can remember: R to next street. R on Boteri. L on Cordoni. L on del Volta. R on 1st street (on R). Boca. Scanning the page, thinking, did I even know what a Rack Focus was back then? Yes, but I didn’t think that way then: it was all raw and wet and cold and febrile.

No laptop; just this book. Checking in to the Casa Boccassini, I hand over my passport. “I’m sorry – Scusi,” I say, without thinking. In English she replies, “you think you’re sorry, I’m Russian” and we leave it at that. A cat jumps on the counter in front of me, purring. Ariel, who has succeeded the polydactyl mouser Muse, who got out the front door one night never to return, and who I learn was in fact not blind, it was the dog who was blind, but I never knew him, so I had combined them in memory.

Ariel, Casa Boccassini’s house cat. (p/c: Daron Hagen)

In the absolute silence of 4 in the morning, awakened by the dings of my sons bidding me sweet dreams as they go to bed in New York six hours earlier, I think of Katherine Mansfield’s critique of Woolf’s Night and Day not reflecting the atomizing effect of the war. But now there is no night, no day, no Day for Night; the 24/7 news cycle and the Internet has ended all that. And here we are, now hurtling once again nella fauce del cane. I send them both heart emojis and mute the phone. But I’m up. The fear of forgetting. Scribbling, fast, in this book: working the whole thing out as a screenplay in my dreams. Closing the book, I try to get back to sleep, but remain hypnagogic.

Dings from the group chat of my colleagues at the Bogliasco Foundation, where I’m writing a book about making operafilms. They’re sharing pictures of the sunrise in Liguria. Now I am experiencing dormiveglia (the liminal zone of being half-asleep or semi-conscious). I can access my dream, which is as clear as a film: it is Carnevale and, earlier today, the angry vendor who hisses, “you wait for the priests to pass” as he holds the lapel of my leather jacket as I try to pass him; the real priests first, then the people beating taiko drums, then the celebrators dressed as celebrants, then the plague masks. “Now you go.” A slow walk to the Accademia to buy a book and pastries for the gang back in Liguria at Pasticceria Toletta, touching the trunks of the sycamores and noting the unchanging changing light, and then a fermata to light a candle at the Chiesa di San Moise for Bernie before walking to San Marco, stopping for dinner at Ristorante da Ivo, specials written by hand on the wall, everything unchanged, reading Bazin’s essays and arguing in the margins as I have since my teens, the long walk back by memory to the Cannaregio, stopping to watch people and to catch my breath and….

The Courtyard at Casa Boccassini (p/c: Daron Hagen)

The rosewater used to launder the sheets gives the room “the loved one” smell. I can no longer bear it. The sun has risen. I must get out. Like the old days, I’ve nothing to pack but my book bag, so I draw the sweaty sheets up on the bed, check for my passport, and pick up the key I’ve accepted for decades. I descend the steps to the garden and sit by the empty fountain to write about the female pilot throwing the lever earlier on the vaporetto: Charon, I think, which is pronounced Karen, I muse, asking her for her name, which is Serena. Had to be. “Serenissima,” I laugh, “were you born here?” “Of course,” she says. I raise my left hand to orans position and silently offer a greeting to the spirit of my old friend Frederick Hammond, who first introduced me to this hotel when we taught together at Bard College and, year after year, stayed here while working on his Frescobaldi treatise. It occurs to me that I was right when I wrote in my memoir, “Yes, this is how this story finally ends.” This gentle riff is enough. Not Muse, but Ariel, marks my legs and I reflexively reach down to scratch her neck, seeing that breakfast has been laid in the room just off the garden. All here is as it was and shall ever be, though the names and people will change.

Ariel means lion of God, I recall while standing in the Basilica di San Marco on my way back to Santa Lucia, about 24 hours after arriving. Soundtrack cue Monteverdi's Lasciatemi morire mixed with Welles V.O. “Maybe a man’s name…” from F for Fake under slow pan east-to-west looking straight up into the basilica’s cupola as I recall the conversation I had with Ford Lallerstedt in 1998 about the way that this specific physical space shaped Claudio Monteverdi’s counterpoint and how that effect might be reproduced visually. I take a picture with my resurrected phone of the sun shining through the stained-glass windows. Why try to put this moment behind bars? I think, erasing it. “You wait for the priests to pass,” he said. “All used up,” Dietrich said to Quinlin. “So, then, why not?” sigh the stones of Ruskin’s Venice, and I take another picture, one with which I will begin a new story, a new sequence of shots, a new tune whose cumulative effect will be … will be to be.

"Now is the Time": Peace, Justice, Good Tunes

There it is, the piano vocal score of your new opera. All those notes. Hundreds of pages of meticulously elevated text. Characters limned through motives, orchestration, clever gimmicks. You flip through the thing, looking for the memorable tunes and....

“I can’t teach you how to write a good tune,” Ned Rorem told me during my first lesson in September 1981 in the tiny attic studio in the mansion at 1726 Locust Street that served as the Curtis Institute, “but I can show you how to make a ‘perfect’ song.” Professional composers craft "inevitability," which listeners and enthusiasts interpret as inspiration. Some readers confuse the joy of “shop-talk” with academic study, and attack composers who pull back the veil in little essays such as this that demystify the process by which a composer does her work.

The fundamental problem with contemporary opera—which is in fabulous shape, in my opinion: lots of new composers trying their hand at lots of vital, socially-conscious subjects, in lots of alternative venues, using all sorts of new technologies—is that, still, still, the overwhelming majority of composers think that creating “elevated parlando” of the sort that this little essay discusses crafting is enough. In fact, if a composer succeeds in creating an opera that sets text in this manner more than half the time, then it is going to be yet another show in search of tunes. Bernstein, looking at one of the tunes that I had penned for my Shining Brow long ago, said that the fact that it rose into recognizable lyric melody was what made it good, and that when it did that, it reminded him of what Marc Blitzstein used to say: “Peace, Justice, and Good Tunes!”

I can’t teach how to compose a good tune any more than Ned (or Lenny) could. And they never talked to me the way that I’m going to talk about setting a line of text to music in this essay. My aim is not to lay down rules, or to make value judgements. This is not particularly deeply thought-through; it is not meant to be a comprehensive overview of strategies. (For example, I’ve completely omitted humorous line-readings, and settings that make the singer a liar, or in disagreement with the words. I'm also leaving out triple and compund meters, and music where the pulse is moving at the eighth note.) I don’t pretend to be an academic. Nothing you’ll read here can be empirically proven to be right or wrong, better or worse. I offer the following thoughts about setting a simple English phrase to music for the delight of non-musicians and the amusement of fellow-composers. We’ve all been here, and, with opera enjoying the resurgence here in the States that it is, there are more of us here than ever.

This essay is not particularly about prosody; rather, it talks about how to make a “highly-elevated” parlando setting of a single, stand-alone common English phrase: “Now is the time for all good souls to come to the aid of their party.”

Somebody once told me: “Play the clarinet in the room; not the one in your head.” It’s great advice. In the case of setting words to music, one has to remember that singers lean heavily on the tradition of “strong” and “weak” beats when deciding how to phrase a melody. Further, when they study their role, they are trained to look for important words, which, traditionally, are put on strong beats. The most important word in a phrase is generally the highest note. If a composer plays against these basic traditions, she should do so knowingly.

I usually begin setting a line of text by doing a “cold read” of it. I set for “sense” first, not for “feel.” Some words, as Jack Beeson explained to me once many years ago, are “inherently fast:” short words, and single syllable words that, if elongated, postpone the amount of time that a listener must wait until they understand what the singer is saying. My stance is that the listener should understand the text above all. Only after I’ve achieved that may I begin to add emotion, color, and psychological effects using the various musical tools in my toolbox. Every moment that an audience is in front of the singer, waiting for her to give them the sense of what they are saying, diminishes the drama just as much as a plot point so obvious that the reveal comes as no surprise.

Having chosen the word deemed “most important” (in this case, I've chosen the word “come”), let’s make it the climax tone. (This is where all those counterpoint exercises you did as a kid come in useful.) Sometimes the most important word is not one that will sound good slung high; that's when you go to Plan B—either by choosing a different word, or through a number of clever tricks we won't talk about here. Then, simply lead up to it, and down from it. Repeatedly hitting the climax tone ends up sounding funny (as Adams intentionally has Madam Mao cluck, chicken-like, about “the book” in Nixon in China) or naive. In any event, it is common sense that, the higher a singer sings, the harder it is to sing; the harder it is to sing, the more intense the emotion. That is the bread and butter of writing for voice.

“Irrational rhythms” include all “tuplets” and non-naturalistic syncopations. (The more "irrational" the rhythm, the more vehemence is being conveyed.) In fact, with parlando recitative, which is what we’re trying to craft here, one starts by trying to capture in the simplest rhythms the essence of a natural line reading, and then, with increasing stylization, aims to enhance the effect of that reading to maximally carry emotional and psychological information. Any time you tie a note across a beat, or introduce a tuplet, emotion increases. The relative weight of the words also shift, making the climax stronger.

One can enhance the naturalism of the line reading by dropping the pitch of the least important words in the lyric. In this case, I dropped the words is, to, and of.

Another strategy is to make certain words “lower neighbors” that are associated with passing chords and secondary dominants in the harmony. In this case, the words is, all, come, and there are associated with intensifying chords. This further puts the spotlight on the most important words. I’ve also made the line more “abstract” this time, separating it into three parts as I would a fugue subject. This is particularly useful if you intend to have the phrase recur in an ensemble later, where you’ll need to be able to treat it contrapuntally. The held tones leave space for other voices to be heard. There’s more artistry and elegance in this line reading, of course, and, with the elegance comes greater lyricism.

The bigger the melodic leap for a singer, the more emotion is generated. Verdi taught us that a dotted rhythm preceding a leap is a thing of great joy and comfort to singers, and excitement to listeners. Dotted rhythms bring out a “marked” quality that voices naturally take on—even stentato can be achieved—remember the way that your mom called out to you the fourth time when you didn’t come in from playing in the backyard for dinner the first three times she called. Big octave leaps also deal efficiently with the problem of moving through the passaggio, if brutally.

Conversely, a line reading can be infused with an enormous amount of emotion quite easily by filling it with suspensions, little staggered breaks, and stretto. This “sobbing” effect is to me the sexiest, most emotionally compelling thing about Monteverdi and company; voices “throb” marvelously (and spontaneously) when asked to do this because of the rubbing together of the vertical harmonies that are being implied by the lubricious melody. This simple arch form is now quite ripe for maximum emotional punch in the hands of any singer—partly because of the hundreds of years of performance practice from whence it cadges its moves.

A singer looking for clues to their character often look to what the composer elects to put above the passaggio; a composer who wants her words understood places them below the passaggio. The “break” in the voice—let’s say it is a D on the second line from the top in treble clef for females and the same place an octave lower for males—is a naturally-occurring resource, or curse, depending on how you look at it. Singers work hard to iron out the change of sound between the two voices whilst traversing it. Composers playing “the clarinet in the room” need to be aware of that. One can help a singer out enormously by simply putting a rest in where they would customarily change voices. In this case, I also messed with the suspensions, pushing them together in stretto to increase the excitement of the line reading.

Another way of creating “arc,” or “lift” to a phrase while enhancing the sense of the words is to make of entire clauses musical gestures. In this case, I’ve made the first measure into an up-beat to the word “souls,” and the rest a simple “paying off,” as in when a ship has just crested a wave.

Another, subtler, method of intensifying understandability and emotion simultaneously is the insertion of dissonance on key words. In this case, I’ve limned the words time, all, souls, aid, and party as though smudging them with my thumb. They “grind” a bit, and hit the ear harder. Combined with lower neighbors, the underlying tune remains secure, but the decorations act as melodic intensifiers. Also, in this example, I’ve intentionally placed two segments of the line “time for all good” and “come to the aid” across the passaggio to intensify them through physical challenge, separating off the head and the tail of the line in a way that accentuate the importance of the central climax.

Combining all the effects discussed above, one final result is a “highly-elevated” parlando setting of the text. It would be impossible for a singer not to sound entirely energized singing it unless they were told by their coach to ignore the many articulations, rhythmic nuances, and other effects arrayed by the composer in an effort to help them shine. I haven’t talked about the crucial matter of articulations. I have elsewhere, and I will do so in another essay. But, for now, I will only encourage any young composer to look at the way that Benjamin Britten uses articulations in his music—and, particularly, in the way that Peter Pears executed them. They constitute an astonishingly varied and specific collection of colors, effects, and techniques.

Having now created really exciting dialogue and recitative for your opera, you can sit down and write the excellent tunes that are opera’s true heart and soul. Nothing is more revealing and inspiring than when a composer throws themselves over the parapet of song; nothing is safer and more disheartening (and frustrating) than a well-intentioned opera filled with nothing more than the sort of highly-effective, honorable, ultimately forgettable vocal writing described above.