Tuesday afternoon, Jocelyn Morlock offered an open workshop
intended to address some of the possibilities of art song from a composer’s
perspective. Instead of examining work by any of the current participants in
the Art Song Lab, she presented some of her own work for audition and scrutiny,
describing the challenges she faced in composing for text and also inviting us
to re-think with her some of the formal and conceptual choices she made in her
work. She opened with a reconsideration of “Somewhere Along the Line,” a song
she created recently with Tom
Cone during the last months of his life, when he was ailing with cancer.
“He never heard it,” she told us. It was first performed by Rena Sharon and
mezzo-soprano Melanie Adams on April 29, 2012; as a circumstantially posthumous
work, it became, Jocelyn Morlock said, “the collaboration I never wanted to
happen.” But the recording she played also helped her and helped us to start to
think about the tensions and convergences at play in the making of an art song,
the ways for her – she suggested at a number of junctures – that the music both
interprets and, with as much care and respect as makes sense (particularly in
this song) for the perceived intention behind the text, misinterprets the
words. All interpretations are, to some extend, inevitably misprisions and
misdirections, but Jocelyn Morlock was particularly concerned with trying to
find connections between the musical and verbal lines in “Somewhere Along the
Line.” Her setting creates a gently constrained pathos – it’s a beautiful
piece. But what makes it even more interesting from a compositional point of
view – to a non-musician like me – is the way in which it exploits
aesthetically the shortfall in meaning that the poem itself thematizes; that
is, the text suggests a trajectory into uncertain space, which she identified
with Tom Cone’s sense of his approaching death: in the poem, he is, she
suggested, “completely on unknown ground.” For me, this uncertainty offers a
potential egress into the formal and conceptual fissures between sound and
sense, music and word, fissures that open in the idea of line, both melodic and poetic. “I try, but can’t,” the poem reads –
but in that truncated half-stich, suggests not failure but a valuing of what it
is to try, of asymptotic convergence, of the approach of declarative and
performative. Music emerges in and as a kind of contingent suturing, not as
closed concord but as carefully collided difference, as mutuality. (See the end of this post for the recording of "Somewhere Along the Line," shared from her SoundCloud page.)
She
played us another of her collaborations with Tom Cone, a less pietistic number
for solo voice called “My Orange Thong,” as well as her own setting of Goethe’s
Second Wanderer’s Nightsong (via
Franz Schubert):
Über allen Gipfeln
Ist Ruh,
In allen Wipfeln
Spürest du
Kaum einen Hauch;
Die Vögelein schweigen in
Walde.
Warte nur, balde
Ruhest du auch.
Discussion about the composer
as translator, as well as questions of deference and fidelity, came up around
this piece. It seemed to me – although I’m not sure that everyone agreed – that
what might be perceived as loveliness or even pathos in this lyric also leans,
particularly in our own time, closer toward bathos and preciousness; how in or
out of step is a Romantic impulse now? It’s a question worth asking, still, and
worth addressing not just reflectively or critically, but also poetically, by
translating. For me, who has only rudimentary and poor German, a word like “Vögelein” wants to be translated,
deliberately, not as “little birds” but as “birdies” (or, someone suggested,
“birdlets” – a bit like Chaucer’s
“briddes” from The Parliament of
Fowles: “On every bough the briddes herde I singe, / With voys of
aungel in hir armonye . . . ” [lines 190-1].) But such translation runs the
risk of disrespect, and of puncturing the overly sweet lyricism (Chaucer says
“ravishing sweetness”) of the text – a harmonious lyricism it appears many
listeners still, 200-odd years later, expect and even demand of a poem. (While
I’m on Chaucer, a few lines later in the poem, he describes a hybrid
Ptolemaic-NeoPlatonic-Christian attunement of the spheres reproduced by that
orchestra of birdies as a model for poetry, for art song:
Of
instruments of strenges in acord
Herde
I so pleye a ravisshing swetnesse,
That
god, that maker is of al and lord,
Ne
herde never better, as I gesse
But I also hear, no doubt
anachronistically, a gentle prising open of high-blown seriousness in the
playfully colloquial, mild irony [rather than stentorian certainty] of his last
phrase, “as I guess” – not so much as discord, but as non-accord, as orchestrated
difference. There was no reference to Chaucer, of course, in the discussion of Goethe and Schubert,
but I’m digressing here to suggest the variously random and agnogenic
resonances that emerged for me as I was listening and thinking about the
respectful translation of text, from person to person, from setting to setting.
I think that this playful uncertainty can offer a creatively energizing model –
one path among many, perhaps – for translation, for collaborative intersections
both within and among art-forms.) Her own resetting of the Goethe text, which
she presented in a recording, was both lyrical and moving; but I also
appreciated what I heard as Jocelyn Morlock’s willingness to embrace play in her music, not to undermine its
aesthetic import but to sustain a non-exclusive openness that seems to me to be
crucial to the collaborative work of art song in all of its styles and
practices.
Prodded by the session with Jocelyn, I took a stab at re-translating
Goethe, with mild disrespect, I suppose, but also with an intention of opening
up the text to other contextual and historical resonances, wanting to emphasize
this brief lyric’s enmeshment in the allusive fabrics, the resonant polysemy,
of our oversaturated and heavily mediatized brains; to me, the simplicity
evoked not so much Chaucer (though “birdies” is still there) as Goethe’s
near-contemporary, the rural wanderer John Clare, with his
off-kilter homey syntax and his concision of diction around, of all things, the
local Northamptonshire birds. So I tried a mash-up and re-mix as translation, a
blurring of the particulate and the shared – still a little overcooked and
thick, a little too adjective-heavy, I guess, I guess. But there you go. Thanks
to Jocelyn Morlock for inspiration, and for an engaging and motivating
workshop. (BTW, the word “exasperated” cut into the poem isn’t in Goethe, but
it suggests breath and comes in this case from the annotations on Alex Mah’s
score “Drift,” which was being rehearsed in the late morning before the
workshop.)
The Vagrant John Clare’s
Second Nightsong, Near Helpston, 1837
Some
kind of calm slouches
across
these bald hillocks
Feeling
stifles itself
in
ruined choirs of trees
Exasperated
birds
go
mum, soon you will too
Soon
enough you will too
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