Songs of Love
from the American Songbook
This anthology of American songs includes some much loved and also some lesser-known songs, including two première recordings. Whilst this selection shows the variation in compositional language during the latter twentieth century, it also portrays the stylistic aesthetics and values of American song in the context of today’s musical panorama. American song (also known as “art song”, as distinct from many other categories of song), developed in the mid- and late- 19th C. in private homes (or ‘parlors’) and concert halls alike, alongside the already much-loved European Lieder and songs, usually translated and published in English.
Among the composers whose songs were performed across the continent were Stephen Foster, Charles Griffes, Charles Ives, Amy Beach, and many others. For example, they contained folk material from the deep south, or that of Irish immigrants. In the early 20th century jazz and swing gained huge popularity, and ragtime-style pieces were influencing classical European composers such as Erik Satie, Claude Debussy, and Darius Milhaud. The arrival of musicians fleeing Europe in the 1930s added further enrichment to American music. On Broadway and in the fast-developing Hollywood, the world of musicals was revolutionized by Kurt Weill, paving the way for great songwriters to come. Gershwin and Bernstein were modern, far from the second Viennese school or Darmstadt influences. The experimental works of John Cage and Morton Feldman co-existed, but the overridingly popular American music style had its own voice, melodious and free.
The selected songs have several points in common, above all how accessible the genre is to the listener, while remaining distinctive. As Scott Wheeler explains, a characteristic of American song composers, as different as Ives, Bernstein, and Bolcom, is that in general they have a connection to popular culture. “We are all aware of jazz, and we don’t despise music’s role in entertainment, though we like to push the bounds with intricate rhythms and harmonies”. This anthology also underlines the role of poetry in the genesis of song, as inspiration to composers to set the words in music. Hence as a form of ‘sung verse’, song is an intimate form of communication, appropriate for expressing the evergreen theme of love.
Writer and composer Ned Rorem wrote much orchestral and chamber music, operas, and several hundred songs. Rorem’s published diaries are as enjoyable as invaluable to the understanding of music and songwriting across the changing twentieth century landscape. His style in song stems from a parsimonious use of harmony, definitely with a French flavor, as heard in the opening song Do I love you more than a day? (to a poem by Jack Larson). Indeed, the melody forming the theme of the song Love (poem by Thomas Lodge) uses Claude Debussy’s note pattern from the opening of the prelude La Fille aux cheveux de lin. Both pieces represent youthful innocence and sensuality, perhaps a homage to the French composer. The Nightingale (anon. traditional) evokes an English folksong, its lovesick minor notes modulating yearningly in search for requited love, but in vain. Then follow two highly contrasting poems by Walt Whitman. O you whom I often, is saucily flirtatious and lasts barely a minute, in contrast with Look down fair moon, a haunting description of the horror and bloodshed of the American Civil War. The piano’s harsh chords and bare fifths stand out like the stiff limbs of the dead in this powerful song of a single page.
The three songs by Samuel Barber include his very first song, written when he was aged 15. The touching lullaby, Slumber song of the Madonna (to a poem by Alfred Noyes) mingles humility and fear with strong maternal love. The song already reveals Barber’s characteristic harmonic texture and intensity, which we again find in Solitary Hotel, to words from James Joyce’s Ulysses. Here the sense of drama is no surprise and a theatrical dimension is created. Barber studied with and was the lifelong partner of Italian opera composer Giancarlo Menotti. His output included songs and operas, many written for Leontyne Price. The voice in Solitary Hotel delivers simple comments or abbreviated phrases, accompanying the piano’s obsessive, passionate tango which mirrors a broken love story. Meanwhile, in The Monk and his Cat, the two protagonists have found their ideal reciprocal love match! From the song cycle The Hermit Songs, to words originally in old Irish Gaelic, the monk is serenely bemused by the antics of his feline companion, Pangur. The song’s final measures are purringly tender.
Lee Hoiby, also a pupil of Menotti, wrote several successful operas and over one hundred songs. As a pianist and a composer, he nurtured a special love for Schubert’s Lieder, which in turn influenced his songwriting style and his care in writing for the voice. An Immorality (poem by Ezra Pound) affirms the wisdom of privileging true love to vain ‘high deeds’, expressed through simple but rich tonal harmony and almost Brahmsian melody. In Summer Song, (to a poem by John Fandel), time itself is suspended, whilst Hoiby’s ecstatically soaring phrases are stylistically reminiscent of songs by Hugo Wolf.
Born in 1924, George Crumb once described music as “a system of proportions in the service of spiritual impulse”. Within his easily accessible music, he is known for his experimentation with timbre, using extreme dynamic ranges, and unusual sonorities. Crumb dismissively described the Three Early Songs as sins of his youth, despite their powerful beauty. Often with subtle echoes of Debussy, the parallel open fifths paint the dramatic night sky, whilst in Crumb’s second song, hypnotic repeated chords accompany the acceptance of past grief, pinched with underlying pain. In the final song, the mellifluous flow of the wind through the sown fields at each new season offers cathartic solace.
The connecting thread of this anthology was initially inspired by the title of the song cycle Mostly about Love, written in 1959 by the composer and critic Virgil Thomson (1896-1889). The whimsical and tender poems are by the New York poet, Kenneth Koch. These songs are written mostly in a simple, impeccable manner, at times in a stylized pastiche of baroque or liturgical music. Each with its own endearing charm, they form one of Thomson’s most successful vocal works. From the very opening of Love Song, we are treated to cascades of surreal metaphors of how to say ‘I love you’. This is followed by Down at the docks, Let’s take a walk, and finally the Prayer to St. Catherine of Siena; Saint Catherine is of course the only saint in Siena capable of curing heartache and shyness.
The pianist and composer John Musto is particularly appreciated for his concert performances of Bach and of jazz. This speaks a lot about his compositions too, where fugue-like or polyphonic style accompaniments alternate with features of ragtime, jazz, or blues. The song Litany (from the cycle Shadow of the Blues), to a poem by Langston Hughes (originally entitled Prayer) is not a religious song, but rather is about offering pity and love to the suffering and forsaken. Although our love may suggest hope (in the high note on “Love”), the piano’s postlude chords indicate a sense of futility and resignation. In Epithalamium (poetry by Denise Lanctot), a woman wistfully relives her first taste of passionate love (which took place ‘in my father’s orchard’), but in Rome: in the Café (poem by James Laughlin) we witness the tragic scene of a fading love affair, as observed by perhaps a new lover. The piano interweaves melodic Bach-like threads, creating a sense of detachment and poignancy.
In You came as a thought, to James Laughlin’s lines, the sung phrases are poised between three static non-resolving chords, but resolve finally in a luminous major chord to the words “You were my evening star”.
Scott Wheeler is a composer with a wide-ranging musical background, shifting stylistically with ease yet always distinctive, and in these four songs one feels the subtle influence of musical theater or film music.
Equinox (to a poem by the late Erika Mumford), reveals the subdued fervor of expectation, where wisps of smoke, twittering sparrows, and hazy swarms of bees are depicted by the piano. In the final bars, a burst of bright clusters hails the spring and its promise of love. Recuerdo, from the song cycle Wasting the Night to poems by Edna St.Vincent Millay, is a bluesy, dreamy account of two lovers who spend all night on the ferry, warmed by the fire of their love, whilst the intimacy and wisdom of The Betrothal, from the same song cycle, unwind in a gentle folk idiom to slightly jazzy harmonies.
I will always be on your side was written to be sung by film actor Marc Tissot, but was never performed. The lyrics were by actor and writer Jack Larson.
In Ophelia’s Song and Spring, from Jake Heggie’s cycle Songs and Sonnets to Ophelia, we are drawn into the perception of the world of a woman, manipulated and dominated by men, to whom love and life are denied. Ophelia’s melancholy reflections become vibrant and dramatic in the words of Heggie and St.Vincent Millay, as her supposed madness and suicide, remain an unanswered question, hence the finale with an edgy,
non-resolved chord.
The anthology finishes turning to Leonard Bernstein’s song A little bit in love (from the 1953 musical, Wonderful Town). Bernstein conveys his characteristic sense of boundless enthusiasm and uniquely contagious joie de vivre translated into music and song.
“And we live because we love”
(Kenneth Koch)
Lorna Windsor © 2021