A Plaint to Man

When you slowly emerged from the den of Time,
And gained percipience as you grew,
And fleshed you fair out of shapeless slime,

Wherefore, O Man, did there come to you
The unhappy need of creating me -
A form like your own - for paying to?

My virtue, power, utility,
Within my maker must all abide,
Since none in myself can ever be,

One thin as a phasm on a lantern-slide
Shown forth in the dark upon some dim sheet,
And by none but its showman vivified.

‘Such a forced device,’ you may say, ‘is meet
For easing a loaded heart at whiles:
Man needs to conceive of a mercy-seat

Somewhere above the gloomy aisles
Of this wailful world, or he could not bear
The irk no local hope beguiles.’

- But since I was framed in your first despair
The doing without me has had no play
In the minds of men when shadows scare;

And now that I dwindle day by day
Beneath the deicide eyes of seers
In a light that will not let me stay,

And to-morrow the whole of me disappears,
The truth should be told, and the fact be faced
That had best been faced in earlier years:

The fact of life with dependence placed
On the human heart’s resource alone,
In brotherhood bonded close and graced

With loving-kindness fully blown,
And visioned help unsought, unknown.

***

The Verve is coming out with a new album in August. Awesome!

In particular, I love Naxos’s recording sung by Karina Gauvin. The text is based on James Agee’s essay (though some call it a prose poem). The full Agee essay is well worth reading, but below is the text of Barber’s song. The music captures beautifully Agee’s nostalgia for a time past, when things seemed simpler, purer, and thus more worthwhile. It captures a very specific time of day and laments the passing of this (”and who shall ever tell the sorrow”). And Gauvin’s voice annunciates clearly the words while maintaining the emotional longing behind each phrase. Wonderful music.

It has become the time of evening when people sit on their porches,
rocking gently and talking gently and watching the street
and the standing up into their sphere of possession of the trees,
of birds’ hung havens, hangers.
People go by; things go by.
A horse, drawing a buggy, breaking his hollow iron music on the asphalt;
a loud auto; a quiet auto;
people in pairs, not in a hurry,
scuffling, switching their weight of aestival body, talking casually,
the taste hovering over them of vanilla, strawberry, pasteboard and starched milk,
the image upon them of lovers and horsemen, squared with clowns in hueless amber.

A streetcar raising its iron moan:
stopping, belling and starting; stertorous; rousing and raising again its iron increasing moan
and swimming its gold windows and straw seats on past and past and past,
the bleak spark crackling and cursing above it like a small malignant spirit set to dog its tracks;
the iron whine rises on rising speed;
still risen, faints; halts; the faint stinging bell;
rises again, still fainter, fainter, lifting, lifts, faints forgone: forgotten.
Now is the night one blue dew.

Now is the night one blue dew,
my father has drained,
now he has coiled the hose.
Low on the length of lawns,
a frailing of fire who breathes …
Parents on porches: rock and rock.
From damp strings morning glories hang their ancient faces.
The dry and exalted noise of the locusts from all the air at once enchants my eardrums.

On the rough wet grass of the backyard my father and mother have spread quilts.
We all lie there, my mother, my father, my uncle, my aunt, and I too am lying there …
They are not talking much, and the talk is quiet,
of nothing in particular, of nothing at all in particular, of nothing at all.
The stars are wide and alive, they seem each like a smile of great sweetness, and they seem very near.

All my people are larger bodies than mine, …
with voices gentle and meaningless like the voice of sleeping birds.
One is an artist, he is living at home.
One is a musician, she is living at home.
One is my mother who is good to me.
One is my father who is good to me.
By some chance, here they are, all on this earth;
and who shall ever tell the sorrow of being on this earth,
lying, on quilts, on the grass, in a summer evening, among the sounds of the night.
May God bless my people, my uncle, my aunt, my mother, my good father,
oh, remember them kindly in their time of trouble;
and in the hour of their taking away.

After a little I am taken in and put to be.
Sleep, soft smiling, draws me unto her:
and those receive me, who quietly treat me,
as one familiar and well-beloved in that home:
but will not, no ,will not, not now, not ever;
but will not ever tell me who I am.

I hope that Bolcom’s Symphony No. 8 finds its way to disc soon, for I am anxious to hear it.

2. Philip Glass’s Violin Concerto (and interesting essay on Glass can be found here)

3. Sir Peter Maxwell Davies‘ Naxos Quartets

4. Kalevi Aho’s Chinese Songs

5. Sir John Tavener’s The Protecting Veil

6. Clint Mansell’s soundtrack for The Fountain

7. Osvaldo Golijov’s Ainadamar

8. Peter Lieberson’s Neruda Songs

9. Thomas Adès‘ America: A Prophecy

10. Ellen Taaffe Zwilich Symphony No. 2 “Cello”

Osvaldo Golijov’s Oceana was another standout from 2007. The title piece is also some of Neruda’s poetry. Also on that album, Dawn Upshaw performs “How Slow the Wind,” a setting of three Emily Dickinson poems. On Golijov’s site, he is quoted as saying this about “How Slow the Wind”:

I had in mind one of those seconds in life that is frozen in the memory, forever-a sudden death, a single instant in which life turns upside down, different from the experience of death after a long agony.

Poetry has, of course, been used repeatedly for settings of songs: Auden by Britten, Tsvetaeva by Shostakovich, Michelangelo by Britten and Shostakovich, Neruda by Barber, Dickinson by Adams, Baudelaire by Debussy, Wilhelm Muller by Schubert, Li Yu by Kalevi Aho, etc.

The connection between poetry and music is ancient. Greeks poets performed their poetry to music. So it is no surprise that poetry is a source of inspiration for many composers. Interestingly, Barber took a snippet of James Agee to create the luscious and wonderful piece Knoxville: Summer of 1915. David Diamond used the text of the Gettsyburg Address for his This Sacred Ground. The lyricism of language, its very ability to create images and connections, has found strong advocates in music. Pop music strives to achieve the same thing (Bono may be the most talented lyricist operating today, and saying “lyricist” seems elitist and reductionist…except for the fact that he doesn’t, so far as I know, present them alone, without the context of music to assist in mood).

I have often claimed that poetry surrounds us; we simply do not hear it most of the time.

Last year I purchased China Gates, the CD released by Nonesuch in 2004. Specifically, I have listened to Hallelujah Junction, a three movement piece for two pianos. My musical knowledge is very limited so any description must bear that in mind. The first movement starts with one piano, followed by a second that sounds to me to repeat the first piano’s part but a slightly faster pace, bringing them inline eventually before letting them part ways. Sometimes they play together, but a single note one piano takes high and the other low. According to Wikipedia and other sources, the name of the piece comes from a truck stop at the junction of US 395 and Alternate US 40 near California and Nevada. It’s a mesmerizing construction whose beauty continues brings me back. Riveting.

I hope my pupils will commit themselves to searching! Because they will know that one searches for the sake of searching. That finding, which is indeed the goal, can easily put an end to striving.

Hermann Broch, final sentence from The Death of Virgil:

It was the word beyond speech.