SONGS OF MIDDLE SPACE
In my opinion, in the production of a composer songs, Lieder or whatever one chooses to call them, represent his most authentic part, like a sort of intimate sound-diary. It is no accident that the songs in this collection cover a span of 50 years, from 1972 to the present, since in fact I never stopped writing songs, although of various typologies and persuasions.
The title, SONGS OF MIDDLE SPACE, refers to songs that belong neither here nor there, or, rather, are “here, there and everywhere” in the sense that they evoke different places, times and atmospheres which, furthermore, may overlap considerably. I’ve always thought different atmospheres and musical styles can coexist.
Speaking in broad terms, the songs in this collection may be grouped in different categories, reflecting the main influences in my music and listening habits:
Jazz songs which in various ways and measures welcome a degree of freedom in phrasing, and often, but not always necessarily, a degree of improvisation. Some are in contemporary jazz style (#12, 13), others (#4, 5) are more rooted in older (#5) or more popular forms. (4, 7, 8). Incidentally, I find strong points of contact between the American songs of the first half of the 20th century featured in the musicals by Gershwin, Cole Porter, Jerome Kern, Richard Rodgers and others, and the Lied cycles by Schubert, Schumann and Brahms. They both lend themselves to highly professional as well as amateur performance practices, and also to various modalities and abilities of improvisation, since basically they share a common harmonic ground.
While all the songs are meant to be sung and played according to the score, some are thru-composed, like contemporary Lieder for the classical duo of voice and piano. (# 6, 9, 10, 11). Others leave room for individual interpretation and improvisation in various degrees, and are scored accordingly. For example, the score of the songs notated in the standard jazz common practice (#12, 13) give only the melody line, the lyrics and the chord changes. The rest, like Hamlet might have said, is the arrangement.
Between these extremes the scoring suggests all kinds of “middle spaces,” for example including chord changes in thru-composed songs (almost all #s), or suggesting bass lines and counterlines in lead-sheet type songs. Jazz-style writing is assumed to be a more or less universal musical lingua franca.
On the whole, assuming the music in this CD sits in these two spaces, they are open enough to accommodate “tropical” or latin breezes occasionally blowing through (#6, 7), and even drafts of Indian monsoons (#3).
(R.L.)
1.Black Lily. This is the first song I wrote, back in 1972. It was written on a commission by Cristyne Lawson and Graham Smith’s Company of Man for the production of Black Ivory, a ballet for masked spectators and dancers premiered at the Albright-Knox Gallery in Buffalo, NY. Originally the text was a Lullaby in The Blacks, the play by Jean Genet on which the production was based, but at the last minute Genet’s widow withdrew her permission to use it, so I sat down and wrote a new text with the help of the dancers in the company.
It is a purely monodic song, a single line open to all kinds of treatments. The accompaniment consists of shifting drones, which can be realized in different ways with different instruments and voices.
2.Awareness of Breath. A song which can be performed both as a vocal solo and an atypical jazz ballad, in which case chord changes should be used. This version uses a backdrop of wind instruments.
3.Salutation to the Sun. A song with an Indian devotional flavor. This is a recording from a live performance back in 1990. According to Indian performing rules, it starts with an alap-like section, followed by the tune in which India meets Brahms.
4.Delta Yearnin’. A song in tongue-in-cheek country style (the Delta to which the lyrics refer to is not the Delta of Mississippi).
5.Hear the Voice. Another song not to be taken too seriously, this time the model for the “cheap imitation” (J. Cage) is Gospel music. To further muddy things up, notice the presence of the didjeridoo.
6.The Garden of Mirrors. This song is a vocal showcase, a bravura aria pitched in a huge range for virtuoso soprano with a Latin feeling.
7.La pension des Alizés. The text to this song was written by writer and singer from Guadalupe Josette Martial, as part of La Voyageuse, a play based on the life of Maryse Condé, Goncourt prize-winner and outstanding writer from Guadalupe. The electronically modified introduction brings me back to when I used to listen to very unstable short-wave radio from the whole world. The tune has a tropical feeling.
8.Sicilitudine. This song tries to express the spirit of Sicily, both in the text (in Sicilian dialect) and the music with a folk-like feeling.
9.La mia sponda. One afternoon, walking on a street in downtown Rome, I passed a woman who attracted my attention, and I turned around. She did the same thing, and we found out that we had been in school together some 30 years before. She was Maria Palma Javarone, who had written the poem when she was 15. The setting is thru-composed and to be played and sung “as is.”
10. Nana’s Song, Another thru-composed Lied with a Kurt Weill flavor. The text speaks of an unhappy housewife.
11. Nähe des Geliebten. One Winter night I was reading Goethe’s poems at a house in the country near Rome. Against all odds, it was snowing. I ran into Nähe des Geliebten and I found it very beautiful. There was a grand piano, and thanks to the heavy snow it felt like being in the Black Forest, resonating to the music of Schubert and Schumann.
I did not know at the time that Schubert had written a Lied to this very poem. I am fascinated by the fact that the same text could inspire such widely different musical atmospheres.
12.Thinkin’ of You. This is a transformation of the preceding song into a jazz up-tempo standard. The text is a paraphrasis in English of the Goethe original.
13.Wind & Water Dance. A song in the modern jazz idiom with a Californian flavor, it is actually a fantasy, in which a sailing trip to Santa Catalina island ruined by sea-sickness turns into an erotic memory.