Category Archives: music

“Sing on! you gray-brown bird”

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“Sing on! you gray-brown bird”

movement eight from When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d: A Requiem for those we love

composed by Paul Hindemith.

text from Walt Whitman’s poem of the same name

Words and music fitting for our present time.

 

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Sing on, sing on you gray-brown bird,
Sing from the swamps, the recesses, pour your chant from the
bushes,
Limitless out of the dusk, out of the cedars and pines.

Sing on dearest brother, warble your reedy song,
Loud human song, with voice of uttermost woe.

O liquid and free and tender!
O wild and loose to my soul—O wondrous singer!
You only I hear—yet the star holds me, (but will soon depart,)
Yet the lilac with mastering odor holds me.

Now while I sat in the day and look’d forth,
In the close of the day with its light and the fields of spring, and
the farmers preparing their crops,
In the large unconscious scenery of my land with its lakes and
forests,
In the heavenly aerial beauty, (after the perturb’d winds and the
storms,)
Under the arching heavens of the afternoon swift passing, and the
voices of children and women,
The many-moving sea-tides, and I saw the ships how they
sail’d,
And the summer approaching with richness, and the fields all busy
with labor,
And the infinite separate houses, how they all went on, each with
its meals and minutia of daily usages,
And the streets how their throbbings throbb’d, and the cities pent
—lo, then and there,
Falling upon them all and among them all, enveloping me with the
rest,
Appear’d the cloud, appear’d the long black trail,
And I knew death, its thought, and the sacred knowledge of
death.

Then with the knowledge of death as walking one side of me,
And the thought of death close-walking the other side of me,
And I in the middle as with companions, and as holding the
hands of companions,
I fled forth to the hiding receiving night that talks not,
Down to the shores of the water, the path by the swamp in the
dimness,
To the solemn shadowy cedars and ghostly pines so still.

And the singer so shy to the rest receiv’d me,
The gray-brown bird I know receiv’d us comrades three,
And he sang the carol of death, and a verse for him I love.

From deep secluded recesses,
From the fragrant cedars and the ghostly pines so still,
Came the carol of the bird.

And the charm of the carol rapt me,
As I held as if by their hands my comrades in the night,
And the voice of my spirit tallied the song of the bird.

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“I will try to remain calm. I will try to concentrate my attention on the sound of the wind and the buzzing of the bees outside my window, the scent of the hoya blossom, … and the sight of the cherry trees in bloom.” — Ella Rutledge, March 30, 2020

 

— posted by Roger W. Smith

   April 2020

the Water Music; thoughts about death

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Last night, on December 2, 2017, I attended a concert by the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra at Carnegie Hall in New York.

The concert began with Handel’s Water Music Suite No. 2 in D Major.

It is good when hearing a musical composition such as the Water Music to see the actual players and how they are arranged on the stage. The horn player — essential to the piece — was at the rear, almost hidden behind the other musicians. The same players, pretty much, in the same arrangement, must have been performing on a barge in the first performance of the Water Music on July 17, 1717. The piece came through so strongly during last night’s performance, so convincingly, just as it must have three hundred years ago.

There was no conductor!

 

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The second work on the program was Shostakovich’s Cello Concerto No. 1 in E-flat Major. It is the first of two cello concertos that Shostakovich composed for the great Soviet cellist Mstislav Rostropovich. What impresses me most, as shown in this work, is the “drive” and energy and the “forward motion” of Shostakovich’s music, which in effect propels the listener along.

The first movement opens with and is built upon a four-note motif from which the piece evolves, just as is the case with Beethoven’s fifth symphony, which opens with a famous four-note motif. It is quite likely that Shostakovich had Beethoven in mind. He is supremely innovative, very modern and often avant-garde, yet at the same time he is, paradoxically, very mindful of composers of the past.

I did not realize that Shostakovich’s two cello concertos were written so late in his career. The Cello Concerto No. 1 was first performed in 1959.

 

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I have been reading a book about Walt Whitman and his views of death as revealed in his poetry: So Long!: Walt Whitman’s Poetry of Death by Harold Aspiz.

I have been reading the book for several weeks — it seems like I’m never going to finish it.

It often takes me a long time to complete books. I plod along, sometimes reading only a page or two before stopping. I mull over passages and often stop to read them a second or third time and digest them after chewing over a passage and pausing to think.

 

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Whitman’s views were continually evolving. He tried to reconcile them. He feared death. He often pretended not to, said (not ingenuously) that he welcomed it.

The author of the book about Whitman I am reading, Harold Aspiz, states:

Although he was acquainted with many of the scientific and religious movements of his age, Whitman could not accept the prevailing secular theories concerning death or those advocated by established religion. He viewed death as an eternal and benign mystery. … At times his poems approach death gladly, as if to embrace it; at times they treat it quizzically, revealing an uncertainty about his own assumptions.

I fear death. I don’t think about it all the time, but I fear it.

I was thinking during the concert of Handel in this connection, and by extension, of all art. It seems to be one way to transcend death, to become “immortal,” to live beyond one’s physical demise. The Water Music has not died, is not desiccated; it lives on in our hearing.

But there other ways to live on: in people’s memories.

Can you suggest other ways? It would be a comfort to be able to contemplate them.

 

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There were over 600 students in the balcony, attending the concert free as guests of the orchestra. They clapped between each movement, a no-no. I forgive them!

 

— Roger W. Smith

   December 3, 2017

musical settings of Walt Whitman’s “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d”

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Hindemith

 

Sessions

 

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Critic Harold Bloom has observed that “Only a few poets in the language have surpassed [Walt Whitman’s poem] ‘When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d’.”

I believe that it is Whitman’s greatest poem, which is saying something. Close rivals for that distinction among Whitman’s poetry might be “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking” and “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry.”

I have posted here (above) two musical settings of “Lilacs.”

German composer Paul Hindemith, who lived in the United States for over a decade, set Whitman’s text to music to mourn the death of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The work, an oratorio, was titled “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d: A Requiem for those we love” (1946).

I have heard this work performed live once, at Carnegie Hall. It never fails to move me. The ninth track on the recording posted here, “Sing on! you gray-brown bird,” brings tears to my eyes.

The recording posted here is by the Robert Shaw Chorale, which commissioned the work, with the mezzo-soprano Jan DeGaetani. It is my favorite performance.

Also posted here is American composer Roger Sessions’s setting of the poem (1977), a cantata. It is noted in a Wikipedia entry that

The University of California at Berkeley commissioned American neoclassical composer Roger Sessions to set the poem as a cantata to commemorate their centennial anniversary in 1964. Sessions did not finish composing the work until the 1970’s, dedicating it to the memories of civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr. and political figure Robert F. Kennedy. Sessions first became acquainted with Leaves of Grass in 1921 and began setting the poem as a reaction to the death of his friend, George Bartlett, although none of the sketches from that early attempt survive. He returned to the text almost fifty years later, composing a work scored for soprano, contralto, and baritone soloists, mixed chorus and orchestra. The music is described as responding “wonderfully both to the Biblical majesty and musical fluidity of Whitman’s poetry, and here to, in the evocation of the gray-brown bird singing from the swamp and of the over-mastering scent of the lilacs, he gives us one of the century’s great love letters to Nature.”

This recording is of a performance conducted by Seiji Ozawa.

 

— Roger W. Smith

  October 2017

“On the Beach at Night Alone” (Vaughan Williams, Whitman)

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“On the Beach at Night Alone” is the second movement from Ralph Vaughan Williams’s “A Sea Symphony” (written between 1903 and 1909; first performed in 1910).

The text of “A Sea Symphony” comes from Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass.

“On the Beach at Night Alone” is a poem by Whitman.

I find this symphony extremely moving and impressive, and this movement has never failed to hold me in awe. I can feel a sense of identity with, and the vicarious experience of, being a walker on the beach (which Whitman often was).

— Roger W. Smith

   October 2017

 

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ON THE BEACH AT NIGHT ALONE.

ON the beach at night alone,
As the old mother sways her to and fro singing her husky song,
As I watch the bright stars shining, I think a thought of the clef
of the universes and of the future.

A vast similitude interlocks all,
All spheres, grown, ungrown, small, large, suns, moons, planets,
All distances of place however wide,
All distances of time, all inanimate forms,
All souls, all living bodies though they be ever so different, or in
different worlds,
All gaseous, watery, vegetable, mineral processes, the fishes, the
brutes,
All nations, colors, barbarisms, civilizations, languages,
All identities that have existed or may exist on this globe, or any
globe,
All lives and deaths, all of the past, present, future,
This vast similitude spans them, and always has spann’d,
And shall forever span them and compactly hold and enclose them.

— Walt Whitman

 

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addendum:

“On the Beach at Night Alone”

What does the poem mean?

Here is my attempt at explaining the poem. Comments are welcome. I am not a poetry expert.

— Roger W. Smith

 

The poet is walking on the beach at night.

“[T]he old mother sways her to and fro singing her husky song.”

The old mother is the sea.

Singing her husky song … the surf roars.

(No fancy words here; Whitman uses the plainest.)

He thinks of the “clef” (key) of the “universes” (multiple universes) and the future (what is now and what is to come, linking the past and the future).

He sees that “A vast similitude interlocks all.”

He sees that things that we often think of as not alike, different, separate: the animate and inanimate … celestial bodies far out in space, the living and the dead, different peoples and nations, are all part of life, having the same life force.

The “vast similitude” is like a giant blanket covering and enveloping anything that ever has existed, does exist, or can be contemplated.

There is unity and coherence in all things.

George Crumb, “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d”

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George Crumb, “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d”

based on Whitman’s poem

 

 

— posted by Roger W. Smith

  March 2016