Twentieth- and Twenty-First-Century Song Cycles for Voice ......Twentieth- and Twenty-First-Century...

Twentieth- and Twenty-First-Century Song Cycles for Voice and Piano

April 20–22, 2018 Michigan State University

Conference Program

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Contents Itinerary at a Glance: p. 3 Song Texts and Translations (in program order): p. 7 Abstracts and Short Bios (in program order): p. 50

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Conference Itinerary at a Glance

For each cycle, the 30-minute scholarly presentation will be first, followed immediately by the performance and then a 10-minute discussion period. Friday, April 20th 1:00–1:45pm: Registration (Music Building, Room 207) 1:45–2:00pm: Welcome (Cook Recital Hall) 2:00–5:35pm: Session 1 (Cook Recital Hall) Michael Callahan, session chair

Wasting the Night (1990) Music by Scott Wheeler

Text by Edna St. Vincent Millay Benjamin Binder, presenter

Martha Guth, soprano Benjamin Binder, piano

Despite and Still (1968)

Music by Samuel Barber Text by Robert Graves, James Joyce, and Theodore Roethke

James Sullivan, presenter Matthew Valverde, tenor Allan Armstrong, piano

15-minute break with beverages (Room 207)

Civil Words (2014)

Music by Jennifer Higdon Text by Anonymous, Thaddeus Oliver, Abraham Lincoln,

William Cullen Bryant, and Kate Putman Osgood Laura Dallman, presenter Gabe Reitemeier, baritone

Qian Zhao, piano 5:35–7:00pm: Dinner (Room 120) 7:00–10:00pm: Session 2 (Cook Recital Hall) Gordon Sly, session chair

4 Verses of Captain Lebyadkin (1974) Music by Dmitri Shostakovich

Text by Dostoyevsky Michael Chikinda, presenter Seth Keeton, bass-baritone

Vedrana Subotic, piano

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From the Diary of Sally Hemings (2000)

Music by William Bolcom Text by Sandra Seaton

Michael Callahan, presenter Joelle Lamarre, soprano

Sheryl Iott, piano Saturday, April 21st 8:00–9:00am: Breakfast (Room 120) 9:00am–12:40pm: Session 3 (Cook Recital Hall) Gordon Sly, session chair

Tel Jour Telle Nuit (1937) Music by Francis Poulenc

Text by Paul Éluard Peter Kaminsky, presenter Christine Roberts, soprano

Neill Campbell, piano

ὁδοιπορία [the journey] (2010) Music by Paul Sánchez

Text by Sappho Mike Morey, presenter

Kayleen Sánchez, soprano Paul Sánchez, piano


Apparition (1979)

Music by George Crumb Text by Walt Whitman

Peter Lea and Julia Bentley, presenters Julia Bentley, mezzo-soprano

Peter Lea, piano 12:40–1:45pm: Lunch (Room 120) (continued on next page)

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1:45–6:00pm: Session 4 (Cook Recital Hall) Michael Callahan, session chair

Sonnets from the Portuguese (1991) Music by Libby Larsen

Text by Elizabeth Barrett Browning Cara Stroud, presenter Jenna Buck, soprano Ya-Ju Chuang, piano

Cold Mountain Songs (1993) Music by Robert Morris

Text by Han-Shan Brian Alegant, presenter

Deborah Norin-Kuehn, soprano Brian Alegant, piano


The Holy Sonnets of John Donne (1945)

Music by Benjamin Britten Text by John Donne

Gordon Sly, presenter Brysien Beer, tenor Sheryl Iott, piano

7:00pm: Banquet Dinner (Kellogg Center Riverside Room) Sunday, April 22nd 8:00–9:00am: Breakfast (Room 120) 9:00–11:15am: Session 5 (Cook Recital Hall) Gordon Sly, session chair

We’ll to the Woods No More (1927) Music by John Ireland

Text by Alfred Edward Housman Jon Wild, presenter

Tyler Martin, baritone Neill Campbell, piano

Pushkin Romances (1935)

Music by Georgy Sviridov Text by Alexander Pushkin

Lisa Feurzeig, presenter Rachael Gates, soprano Robert Cornwell, piano

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11:15–11:45am: Break (Room 120) Boxed lunches can be picked up at this time or at the conclusion of the conference. 11:45am–1:05pm: Session 5, continued (Cook Recital Hall)

Das Buch der hängenden Gärten (1908–9) Music by Arnold Schoenberg

Text by Stefan George Jessica Narum, presenter

Tracy Grady, soprano Sungeun Kim, piano

1:05–1:30pm: Conference Wrap-Up (Music Building Room 120)

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Song Texts and Translations (in program order)

Wasting the Night (1990) Music by Scott Wheeler

Text by Edna St. Vincent Millay 1. Thursday And if I loved you Wednesday, Well, what is that to you? I do not love you Thursday – So much is true. And why you come complaining Is more than I can see. I loved you Wednesday, – yes – but what Is that to me? 2. Recuerdo We were very tired, we were very merry — We had gone back and forth all night on the ferry. It was bare and bright, and smelled like a stable — But we looked into a fire, we leaned across a table, We lay on a hill-top underneath the moon; And the whistles kept blowing, and the dawn came soon. We were very tired, we were very merry — We had gone back and forth all night on the ferry; And you ate an apple, and I ate a pear, From a dozen of each we had bought somewhere; And the sky went wan, and the wind came cold, And the sun rose dripping, a bucketful of gold. We were very tired, we were very merry, We had gone back and forth all night on the ferry. We hailed, “Good morrow, mother!” to a shawl-covered head, And bought a morning paper, which neither of us read; And she wept, “God bless you!” for the apples and pears, And we gave her all our money but our subway fares. 3. I shall forget you I shall forget you presently, my dear, So make the most of this, your little day, Your little month, your little half a year Ere I forget, or die, or move away, And we are done forever; by and by I shall forget you, as I said, but now, If you entreat me with your loveliest lie

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I will protest you with my favorite vow. I would indeed that love were longer-lived, And vows were not so brittle as they are, But so it is, and nature has contrived To struggle on without a break thus far, — Whether or not we find what we are seeking Is idle, biologically speaking. 4. Time does not bring relief Time does not bring relief; you all have lied Who told me time would ease me of my pain! I miss him in the weeping of the rain; I want him at the shrinking of the tide; The old snows melt from every mountain-side, And last year’s leaves are smoke in every lane; But last year’s bitter loving must remain Heaped on my heart, and my old thoughts abide. There are a hundred places where I fear To go,—so with his memory they brim. And entering with relief some quiet place Where never fell his foot or shone his face I say, “There is no memory of him here!” And so stand stricken, so remembering him. 5. The Betrothal Oh, come, my lad, or go, my lad, And love me if you like! I shall not hear the door shut Nor the knocker strike. Oh, bring me gifts or beg me gifts, And wed me if you will! I’d make a man a good wife, Sensible and still. And why should I be cold, my lad, And why should you repine, Because I love a dark head That never will be mine? I might as well be easing you As lie alone in bed And waste the night in wanting A cruel dark head! You might as well be calling yours What never will be his, And one of us be happy; There’s few enough as is.

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Despite and Still (1968) Music by Samuel Barber

Text by Robert Graves, James Joyce, and Theodore Roethke

1. A Last Song (originally “A Last Poem”) Robert Graves A last song [poem], and a very last, and yet another— O, when can I give over? Must I drive the pen until blood bursts from my nails And my breath fails and I shake with fever, Or sit well wrapped in a many-coloured cloak Where the moon shines new through Castle Crystal? Shall I never hear her whisper softly: “But this is truth written by you only, And for me only; therefore, love, have done”? 2. My Lizard (Wish for a Young Love) (originally “Wish for a Young Wife”) Theodore Roethke My lizard, my lively writher, May your limbs never wither, May the eyes in your face Survive the green ice Of envy’s mean gaze; May you live out your life Without hate, without grief, And your hair ever blaze, In the sun, in the sun, When I am undone, When I am no one. 3. In the Wilderness Robert Graves He, of his gentleness, Thirsting and hungering Walked in the wilderness; Soft words of grace he spoke Unto lost desert-folk That listened wondering. He heard the bittern call From ruined palace-wall, Answered him brotherly; He held communion With the she-pelican Of lonely piety. Basilisk, cockatrice, Flocked to his homilies, With mail of dread device, With monstrous barbed stings,

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With eager dragon-eyes; Great bats on leathern wings And old, blind, broken things Mean in their miseries. Then ever with him went, Of all his wanderings Comrade, with ragged coat, Gaunt ribs—poor innocent— Bleeding foot, burning throat, The guileless young scapegoat; For forty nights and days Followed in Jesus’ ways, Sure guard behind him kept, Tears like a lover wept. 4. Solitary Hotel (from Ulysse s) James Joyce

[What suggested scene was then constructed by Stephen?] Solitary hotel in mountain pass. Autumn. Twilight. Fire lit. In dark corner young man seated. Young woman enters. Restless. Solitary. She sits. She goes to window. She stands. She sits. Twilight. She thinks. On solitary hotel paper she writes. She thinks. She writes. She sighs. Wheels and hoofs. She hurries out. He comes from his dark corner. He seizes solitary paper. He holds it towards fire. Twilight. He reads. Solitary.

What? In sloping, upright and backhands: Queen’s hotel, Queen’s hotel, Queen’s Ho…

5. Despite and Still Robert Graves Have you not read The words in my head, And I made part Of your own heart? We have been such as draw The losing straw— You of your gentleness, I of my rashness, Both of despair— Yet still might share This happy will: To love despite and still. Never let us deny The thing’s necessity, But, O, refuse To choose Where chance may seem to give Loves in alternative.

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Civil Words (2014) Music by Jennifer Higdon

Text by Anonymous, Thaddeus Oliver, Abraham Lincoln, William Cullen Bryant, and Kate Putman Osgood

Enlisted Today Unknown I know the sun shines, and the lilacs are blowing, And the summer sends kisses by beautiful May— Oh! To see all the treasures the spring is bestowing, And think my boy Willie enlisted today, It seems but a day since at twilight, low humming, I rocked him to sleep with his cheek upon mine, While Robby, the four-year old, watched for the coming Of father, down the street’s indistinct line. It is many a year since my Harry departed, To come back no more in the twilight or dawn: And Robby grew weary of watching, and started Alone on the journey his father had gone. It is many a year—and this afternoon sitting At Robby's old window, I heard the band play, And suddenly ceased dreaming over my knitting, To recollect Willie is twenty today. And that, standing beside him this soft May-day morning, And the sun making gold of his wreathed cigar smoke, I saw in his sweet eyes and lips a faint warning, And choked down the tears when he eagerly spoke: “Dear mother, you know how these Northmen are crowing, They would trample the rights of the South in the dust, The boys are all fire; and they wish I were going—” He stopped, but his eyes said, “Oh, say if I must!” I smiled on the boy, though my heart it seemed breaking, My eyes filled with tears, so I turned them away, And answered him, “Willie, ‘tis well you are waking— Go, act as your father would bid you, today!” I sit in the window, and see the flags flying, And drearily list to the roll of the drum, And smother the pain in my heart that is lying And bid all the fears in my bosom be dumb.

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And if he should fall—his young life he has given For freedom’s sweet sake; and for me, I will pray Once more with my Harry and Robby in Heaven To meet the dear boy that enlisted today. All Quiet [from “All Quiet Along the Potomac Tonight”] Thaddeus Oliver “All quiet along the Potomac to-night!” Except here and there a stray picket Is shot, as he walks on his beat, to and fro, By a rifleman hid in the thicket. ‘Tis nothing! A private or two now and then Will not count in the news of the battle; Not an officer lost! Only one of the men Moaning out, all alone, the death-rattle. “All quiet along the Potomac to-night!” Where the soldiers lie peacefully dreaming; And their tents in the rays of the clear autumn moon, And the light of their camp-fires are gleaming. A tremulous sigh, as a gentle night-wind Through the forest leaves softly is creeping; While the stars up above, with their glittering eyes, Keep guard o’er the army while sleeping. There’s only the sound of the line sentry’s tread, As he tramps from the rock to the fountain, And he thinks of the two in the low trundle bed, Far away, in the cot on the mountain. His musket falls slack, his face, dark and grim, Grows gentle with memories tender, As he mutters a prayer for the children asleep, And their mother—“may heaven defend her!” The moon seems to shine forth as brightly as then— That night, when the love, yet unspoken, Leaped up to his lips, and when low-murmured vows Were pledged to be ever unbroken. Then drawing his sleeve roughly over his eyes, He dashes off tears that are welling; And gathers his gun closer up to his breast, As if to keep down the heart’s swelling.

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He passes the fountain, the blasted pine tree, And his footstep is lagging and weary; Yet onward he goes, through the broad belt of light, Towards the shades of the forest so dreary. Hark! Was it the night wind that rustled the leaves? Was it moonlight so wondrously flashing? It looked like a rifle: “Ah! Mary, good-bye!” And his life-blood is ebbing and splashing. “All quiet along the Potomac to-night!” No sound save the rush of the river; While soft falls the dew on the face of the dead, And the picket's off duty forever! Lincoln’s Final [from the 2nd Inaugural Address] Abraham Lincoln Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation’s wounds; to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow, and his orphan—to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace, among ourselves, and with all nations. The Death of Lincoln William Cullen Bryant Oh, slow to smite and swift to spare, Gentle and merciful and just! Who, in the fear of God, didst bear The sword of power, a nation’s trust! In sorrow by thy bier we stand, Amid the awe that hushes all, And speak the anguish of a land That shook with horror at thy fall. Thy task is done; the bond are free: We bear thee to an honored grave, Whose proudest monument shall be The broken fetters of the slave. Pure was thy life; its bloody close Hath placed thee with the sons of light, Among the noble host of those Who perished in the cause of Right.

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Driving Home [from “Driving Home the Cows”] Kate Putnam Osgood Out of the clover and blue-eyed grass, He turned them into the river-lane; One after another he let them pass, Then fastened the meadow bar again. Under the willows, and over the hill, He patiently followed their sober pace; The merry whistle for once was still, And something shadowed the sunny face. Only a boy! And his father had said He never could let his youngest go; Two already were lying dead Under the feet of the trampling foe. But after the evening work was done, And the frogs were loud in the meadow swamp, Over his shoulder he slung his gun, And steadily followed the footpath damp. Across the clover and through the wheat, With resolute heart and purpose grim, Though cold was the dew on his hurrying feet, And the blind bat’s flitting startled him. Thrice since then had the lanes been white, And the orchards sweet with apple-bloom; And now when the cows came back at night, The feeble father drove them home. For news had come to the lonely farm That three were laying where two had lain; And the old man’s tremulous, palsied arm Could never lean on a son’s again. The summer day grew cool and late, He went for the cows when the work was done; But down the lane, as he opened the gate, He saw them coming one by one, Brindle, Ebony, Speckle, and Bess, Shaking their horns in the evening wind; Cropping the buttercups out of the grass, But who was it following close behind?

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Loosely swung in the idle air The empty sleeve of army blue; And worn and pale, from the crisping hair Looked out a face that the father knew. For the Southern prisons will sometimes yawn, And yield their dead unto life again; And the day that comes with a cloudy dawn In golden glory at last may wane. The great tears sprang to their meeting eyes; For the heart must speak when lips are dumb; And under the silent evening skies, Together they followed the cattle home.

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4 Verses of Captain Lebyadkin (1974) Music by Dmitri Shostakovich

Text by Dostoyevsky Lyubov Kapitana Lebyadkina Lyubvi pylayushchey granata Lopnula v grudi Ignata. I vnov zaplakal gorkoy mukoy Po Sevastopolyu bezrukiy. Khot v Sevastopole ne byl, i dazhe ne bezrukiy, no kakovy zhe rifmy! No kakovy zhe rifmy! I porkhayet zvezda na kone V khorovode drugikh amazonok; Ulybayetsya s loshadi mne Ari-sto-krati-cheskiy rebyonok. Sovershenstvu devitsy Tushinoy. Milostivaya gosudarynya Elizaveta Nikolayevna! O kak mila ona, Elizaveta Tushina, Kogda s rodstvennikom na damskom sedle letayet, A lokon eyo s vetrami igraet, Ili kogda s materyu v tserkvi padayet nits, I zritsya rumyanets blagogoveynikh lits! Togda brachnykh i zakonnykh naslazhdeniy zhelayu I vsled ey, vmeste s materyu, slezu posylayu. Vsluchaye yeslib on a slomala nogu. Krasa krasot slomala chlen i interesney vdvoye stala, i vdvoye sdelalsya vlyublyon vlyublyonniy uzh nemalo. Sostavil neucheniy za sporom.

The Love of Captain Lebyadkin The cannonball of fiery love burst in the breast of Ignatius And the armless man cried again in bitter torment for Sevastopol. Although I’ve never been to Sevastopol, and never lost an arm. But what rhymes! What rhymes! A star flits upon a horse, circling round with other Amazons; and at me smiles from horseback an ari-sto-cratic child. To the paragon, Miss Tushin. Dear Lady, Elizaveta Nikolayevna! Oh, how sweet she is, Elizaveta Tushin, When she flies side-saddle with her cousin, and her curls play in the wind, or when in church with her mother she bows down to the ground and the blush of reverent faces can be seen! Then I desire wedded and legal pleasures, and to her — and her mother — I send a tear. And if she were to break a leg… If this beauty of beauties broke a limb, she would be twice as interesting, and I would love her twice as much. Composed by an untutored man during an argument.

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Tarakan Zhil na svete tarakan, Tarakan ot detstva, I potom popal v stakan Polny mukhoyedstva— — Gospodi! Shto takoye? — To yest, kogda letom v stakan nalezut mukhi, to proiskhodit mukhoyedstvo, vsyakiy durak poimyot, ne perebivaite, ne perebivaite, vy uvidite, vy uvidite! Pozhaluista, snachala! Zhil na svete tarakan, Tarakan ot detstva, I potom popa v stakan Polny mukhoyedstva. Mesto zanyal tarakan, Mukhi vozroptali, Polon ochen nash stakan K Yupiteru zakrichali. No, poka u nikh shol krik, Podoshol Nikifor, Blagorodneishiy starik… Tut u menya yeshcho ne dokoncheno, no vse ravno, slovami… Nikifor beryot stakan i, nesmotrya na krik, vyplyoskivayet v lokhan vsyu komediyu, i mukh, i tarakana, shto davno nado bylo sdelat. No zamet’te, no zamet’te, sudarynya, tarakan ne ropshchet, tarakan ne ropshchet. Shto zhe kasayetsya do Nikifora, to on izobrazhayet prirodu.

The Cockroach A cockroach lived upon the earth, a cockroach from its childhood, and then it fell into a glass full of fly-killer… — Good Lord! What’s all this about? — What it means, is that when flies crawl into a glass in summer, they fall into fly-killer. Any fool knows that. Don’t interrupt, don’t interrupt — you’ll see! Excuse me, we’ll start again… A cockroach lived upon the earth, a cockroach from its childhood, and then it fell into a glass full of fly-killer. The cockroach took up a lot of room, the flies grumbled. “Our glass is very full,” they screamed to Jupiter. But while they were screaming, up came Nikifor, a most noble old man… I haven’t quite finished it yet, but never mind, I’ll explain in a few words… Nikifor takes the glass, ignores the shouting, and pours the whole lot down the drain, flies, cockroach and all, which should have been done long ago. And mind you, madam, mind you, the cockroach doesn’t raise a murmur, not a murmur. As regards Nikifor, he represents Nature.

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Bal v polzu guvernantok Zravstvuy, zravstvuy, guvernantka! Veselis i torzhestvuy. Retrogradka il Zhorzh-Zandka, Vse ravno teper likuy! Uchish ty detey soplivykh Po-frantsuzski bukvaryu I podmigivat gotova, Chtoby vzyal, khot ponmaryu! No v nash vek reform velikikh Ne vozmet i ponomar; Nado, baryshnya, “tolikikh”, Ili snova za bukvar. No teper, kogda, piruya, My sobrali kapital, I pridanoye, tantsuya, Shlyom tebe iz etikh zal. Retrogradka il Zhorzh-Zandka, Vse ravno teper likuy! Ty s pridanym, guvernantka, Pluy na vsyo i torzhestvuy! Pluy! Likuy! I torzhestvuy!

The Ball for the Benefit of Governesses Greetings, greetings, Governess! Be merry and celebrate. Whether you’re backward or George Sand-ish, celebrate now anyway! You teach snotty-nosed children the French alphabet, and are ready to wink so that anyone’ll take you, even a sexton. But in our century of great reforms, even a sexton won’t take you. Young lady, you need some cash, or you’ll be back to the alphabet again. But now when we’re feasting and have collected some capital, and a dowry, and we’re dancing, we’ll send you men from these halls. Whether you’re backward or George Sand-ish, celebrate now anyway. You are a governess with a dowry. Spit on the lot and celebrate! Spit! Enjoy yourself! Celebrate!

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Svetlaya Lichnost On neznatnoy byl porody, On vozros sredi naroda, No gonimiy mestyu tsarskoy, Zlobnoy zavistyu boyarskoy, On obryok sebya stradanyu, Kaznyam, pytkam, istyazanyu, I poshyol veshchat narodu Bratstvo, ravenstvo, svobodu. Ekh! I vosstanye nachinaya, On bezhal v chuzhiye krayi Iz tsareva kazemata, Ot knuta, shchiptsov i kata. A narod, vosstat gotoviy Iz pod uchasti surovoy Ot Smolenska do Tashkenta S neterpenyem zhdal studenta. Ekh! Zhdal yevo on pogolovno, Chtob idti bezprekoslovno, Poreshit v konets boyarstvo, Poreshit sovsem i tsartstvo, Sdelat obshchimi imenya I predat na veki mshchenyu Tserkvi, braki i semeystvo— Mira starovo zlodeystvo! Ekh! Mira starovo zlodeystvo! Ekh!

A Radiant Personality He was not of noble birth and grew up among the people, a victim of the Tsar’s vengeance, and the evil nobles’ envy. He chose a life of suffering, executions, torture, torment, and went off to teach the people brotherhood, equality and freedom. Hey! He started a rebellion and escaped to foreign parts, fleeing from the Tsar’s dungeon, and the knout, rack and executioner. And the people were ready to rise from their stern fate and from Smolensk to Tashkent waited impatiently for the student. Hey! Everyone waited for him so as to go unquestioningly to finish off the nobles, to finish off the Tsar, to make the land common, and to take vengeance forever on church, marriage and family— the evils of the old world. Hey! The evils of the old world. Hey!

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From the Diary of Sally Hemings (2000) Music by William Bolcom

Text by Sandra Seaton Note: Thomas Jefferson’s spoken words are in italics, as are quotations from his writings. To distinguish Jefferson’s own words from those of Sally Hemings or other speakers, no other words are italicized, including French phrases. Part One I. They say I was born old, so so old before my time. I stood by mother, under the canopy bed, saw Mistress Jefferson raise four fingers. I was nine years old. Heard Mother’s voice: Sally, keep this bell, pray for your dear sister. The master, tall, straight back bent in grief, swore he’d never wed again. II. Martha and Maria, hands clasped together in the shade of his poplar tree, we skipped and stopped, spied his words on her grave: If in the house of Hades, men forget their dead, yet will I remember my dear companion. Most days I sit with Maria and Martha, her quill resting in my palm, a spy in another country. Inside, the big house. Outside, Mother’s cabin. Sally the sweet child or the little terror. The smart ones are the most trouble. Here, Martha, let me hold the book. We’ll pretend. Stuff your gown with these old rags, put best dolly to your breast. Like so. III. White waves. A century gone. My mother’s mother in the lower deck. Wet and cold in the blue black night, I dreamt a bitter dream: Dahomey child, betrothed when she was young, a princess before she knew of white men or the sea, she knew the ways of home. A thin veil of fog. Her family brings a farmer, a boy not yet a man, to their grand banquet, to marry with the business of the home. Each dawn she climbs the palm tree to touch the wine with her hands. A feast prepared, the gods must have a hand in this: a young goat sacrificed, okra, oranges, a basket of yams laid at her feet. She stands in the midst of old friends, clothed in new finery, buba and iro of an odd-colored blue, hair in beads, piled to the sky, tapping the palm wine from the palm tree. Kidnapped before the roast meat was cold, snatched away to America, she was a stranger to the sea. White waves in the blue-black sea. Now a voyage of a different sort. Maria wouldn’t go unless I came along. White waves in the blue-black sea, till we land in port. IV. Paris, c’est la ville vivante. Men call me beautiful, une vigne sauvage. Skin white, whiter than white, near white. From the first moment of the day, Master Jefferson wants things just so. A young woman must dress properly. Not a wrinkle nor a speck of dirt. If I break another dish, I won’t have to wash the Sèvres again. “Master Jefferson, our French is poor. Those words we learned back home, a girl’s French, they don’t work here.” The French tutor comes to our villa. I hurry around, dusting the room. Then I stop, pick up the book, copy the words carefully. “Excusez-moi, est-ce que j’ai trouvé la bonne place?” “Mademoiselle, your French, where did you learn that?” “Was I not expected to know?” “Where did you learn your French?” “At the big house, where else?” Stirring the sauce, adding the cream, reduce by half. Fort bien. Champagne Poisson, a marvelous sauce. C’est formidable. Rage de Paris. V. The master brings music to his sitting room, a fine harpsichord to soothe his head. His pain is my own.

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The grand dukes and their duchesses, they say “elle est charmante et fine.” On our morning walk when the men bow, his possessiveness keeps me safe. Comme d’habitude, first one servant boy, then another, they follow me when Master Tom leaves. On his return, he finds me hiding in the little closet. A rich man, the Marquis de Brailles, offers him gold for me. “Il est trop entreprenant.” Master Jefferson flies into a horrible rage. VI. I was carrying a tray when he called me. Sally, turn this way. Now hold your face to the light. A little over. Master Jefferson looked whiter than a sheet, whiter than I ever was. He cupped my face in his hands and whispered her name. Part Two VII. They say I was born old, so so old before my time. The rage, the anger, épouvantable! The sound of thunder. Tear down the gate Throw off the chains! Another traitor sent to hell. Storm the Bastille! Effrayant, the light of lightning. Girl, you’ve been here before. Safe in his arms, but still my voice frightens him. VIII. Come back to America. No work to stain your tender hands, the run of the house. Your own gloves, gowns, robe à la francaise, skirts draped à la polonaise, partitioned like Poland. Extraordinary Privileges. A servant of your own, a cup of broth, a plate of Marseilles figs at dawn. I said no. Then he took to his sickbed, six long days he moaned, cried out: Come back with me. Brioche en couronne. Your own pen and quill. You can copy lines from Tristram Shandy. You’ll gain my fidelity. I said no again. When I said yes, we packed bags for America, set sail with two cork oak trees, no apricots but one white fig, five large pears, three Italian poplars, and une robe à la francaise. IX. Back home at Monticello, I step out of the carriage. Oh, they’re so surprised to see me in pretty clothes, skirt draped à la polonaise. A promise kept. It’s my first, so I don’t show. Elle n’a pas l’air. Till Mother puts her hand on my dress, through many layers of clothes. Enceinte. X. Purple Hyacinth begins to bloom. Alone in his sanctum sanctorum, I call him Mister. No woman goes there but me. I am in charge of his chamber, a position of power, three little rooms with a wall of seeds, his kingdom in a small closet, a garden labeled and hung in perfect order. Yesterday I found five plums. I have a room of my own. In that room I am a seamstress, a servant, one above the others, a mother—babe, come nestle in my arms—a wife who cannot go to quilt, a mistress who shares her household, who holds a daughter’s trust. The next best thing. Purple Hyacinth and Narcissus bloom. XI. My sister ghost, rather me than a stranger who rules her own kingdom. Rather me than a stranger. Bloodlines! A lady dresses properly from the earliest moment of the day. With impeccable manners he gives me a lecture on how to dust a book: Hold the feather duster to the book. No, like so. Place your hand on mine here. First the cover, firm but not too firm. Dust the pages, then the rim. Now, smooth the sheets, spread the bed. Then he arranged my hair on the pillow. One day I called him Tom. He turned, startled: Now hold your face towards the light. He held me close. The earth belongs to the living.

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Her ghost appears once more, stands nearby. (Even without a mirror, she knows she never had my looks.) Sister dear, I hold your daughter’s trust. Rather me than a mistress who sets her own standard. Rather me than a stranger. Bloodlines! Bloodlines! Part Three XII. Peonies, a perfume box. Wild Honeysuckle still in bloom. Quadroon. Octoroon. Mixing colors in a vase. The orderly and the insignificant. A list? Yes, your orderliness. The garden book, two blotters, one scope, powder for my hair. Over there. What’s the little one doing with my book? Mister, I’m reading it to him. Mister, should I wear these bird-plumes in my hair? He blushed, said yes—a little music please. Plumes. Dolley Madison named our boy and promised me a fine gift, a hat with plumes. I never received it. XIII. Mister, our child is frail. This time pray with me. Pray she has strength. Glory be to God. Hosanna in the highest. Another babe gone. No sooner had I finished nursing her than she left my arms. God rest her soul. Keep her safe. Did I tell you, Lord? Martha’s child had a fine funeral, gloves passed out by the hundreds, buried in the family plot. Not like my Baby Harriet. XIV. A dark winter blue-black evening, la vie nocturne. Mister! Do you remember a Madame So-and-So who did not wear her jewelry well or arrange her hair? And the Madame d’Étoiles with her grand ballon that reached the sky, who walked alongside the Duc de Brissac, carrying her jeweled fan? In her silks and her pearls she advises the Duc on affairs of state. Mister! Where are all the kings and queens? XV. Old shoe! Old shoe! He fiddles for the children, for me. Taught the boys to read and write, though we can’t admit it. Did the boys learn their lessons? Madison, stand still. Bow for Mister Jefferson. Old shoe. They say let a man have his ways. Make a little home. Don’t question him when he goes away, so they say. A letter from Washington, with cotton stockings wrapped in tissue. A little note: he misses me in the morning. Those headaches are bothering him. Lord, keep him safe. Oh! Mister! Earbobs all the way from Philadelphia. I’ll wear them well. There’s been no other woman in his bed. Old shoe! Part Four XVI. A wild man home from the woods. Severe weather has killed most of the fruit. When he’s like this, he has to do something. He’s tearing up the house again. The dust, his headaches. Heavenly father, he’s wearing his old brown coat and socks and don’t match. Is he a servant or master? Smooth the bed, spread the sheets, coax the weather from his bones. If in the house of Hades, men forget their dead…La vie nocturne à Paris. To hold once more an ivory fan! XVII. Papers! I’ve never seen so many. When I come in, he hides the news. Cancel all the papers. Do you hear me? Let no man break this bond. Sworn to secrecy.

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Old shoe! Be rid of me. You’ll save your name. Mister, take this part, the part that was my sister’s, my soul. Our son Beverly ran off. And Harriet was sent away in a carriage, clutching a thin gold cross. Hyacinth and Narcissus gone. XVIII. Night watch till early morn. Smooth the sheets. Spread the bed. No need to send for me. I left our pillow by your side. Mister, you’re free to go. Lay out the trousers, press the coat. Starched linen shirt and collar bears his fine embroidered vest. No powder for his hair. A touch of ribbon near his slippered feet. No need to hide the news. At dawn her ghost appears. Do I covet, Lord? She never had my looks. Night watch till early morn. I dare not sleep lest the ground grow wild. If I take my freedom, come and go, Old Shoe, will you pursue me still? No room for me in your graveyard. A servant in my place. Morning glory! A little house with my darling sons. Madison says I’m pining away. Round back, I hear Tom keeping time for Eston, fiddler, fiddle, fiddle, string! Do I dare disturb their bond? At dusk her ghost returns. Plumes in her hair. He lies with her in his sanctum sanctorum. A hedge of willows marks their sitting room. “No sound to break the stillness but a brook…the feeble ray of a half-extinguished lamp…” Blue-black evening, la vie nocturne. I’ll come to tend your grave. But you’ll sleep, you’ll sleep with sister dear. Crave me. Dear children, his letters, my diary, this picture with his name, strike every word. I was born old, so old before my time. Once I went off to see the world, sailed across the sea, longed for a pouf à la circonstance, a crown to touch the sky. Mister, we’re free to go. Leave your old clothes behind. This time walk with me to the Lord. We’ll dress in our new finery, silk robes to meet our Lord.

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Tel Jour Telle Nuit (1937) Music by Francis Poulenc

Text by Paul Éluard Translations by Sidney Buckland. From “’The coherence of opposites’: Eluard, Poulenc and the poems of Tel jour telle nuit. In Sidney Buckland and Myriam Chimènes, eds., Francis Poulenc: Music, Art and Literature. Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999. 1. Bonne journée Bonne journée j’ai revu qui je n’oublie pas Qui je n’oublierai jamais Et des femmes fugaces dont les yeux Me faisaient une haie d’honneur Elles s’enveloppèrent dans leur sourires Bonne journée j’ai vu mes amis sans soucis Les hommes ne pesaient pas lourd Un qui passait Son ombre changée en souris Fuyait dans le ruisseau J’ai vu le ciel très grand Le beau regard des gens privés de tout Plage distante où personne n’aborde Bonne journée qui commença mélancolique Noire sous les arbres verts Mais qui soudain trempée d’aurore M’entra dans le coeur par surprise.

1. A good day A good day I have seen again who I do not forget Who I shall never forget And fleeting women whose eyes Formed for me a hedge of honour They wrapped themselves in their smiles A good day I have seen my friends carefree The men were light in weight One who passed by His shadow changed into a mouse Fled into the gutter I have seen the great wide sky The beautiful eyes of those deprived of everything Distant shore where no one lands A good day which began mournfully Dark under the green trees But which suddenly drenched with dawn Entered my heart unaware.

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2. Une ruine coquille vide Une ruine coquille vide Pleure dans son tablier Les enfants qui jouent autour d’elle Font moins de bruit que des mouches La ruine s’en va à tâtons Chercher ses vaches dans un pré J’ai vu le jour je vois cela Sans en avoir honte Il est minuit comme une flèche Dans un coeur à la portée Des folâtres lueurs nocturnes Qui contredisent le sommeil.

2. A ruin an empty shell A ruin an empty shell Weeps into its apron The children who play around it Make less sound than flies The ruin goes groping To look for its cows in a meadow I have seen the day see it Without a sense of shame It is midnight like an arrow In a heart within reach Of the lively nocturnal glimmerings That gainsay sleep.

3. Le front comme un drapeau perdu Le front comme un drapeau perdu Je te traîne quand je suis seul Dans des rues froides Des chambres noires En criant misère Je ne veux pas les lâcher Tes main claires et compliquées Nées dans le miroir clos des miennes Tout le rest est parfait Tout le reste est encore plus inutile Que la vie Creuse la terre sous ton ombre Une nappe d’eau près des seins Où se noyer Comme une pierre.

3. Your countenance like a lost cause Your countenance like a lost cause I drag you when I am along Through cold streets Dark rooms Shouting misery I do not want to let them go Your clear and complex hands Born in the enclosed mirror of my own All the rest is perfect All the rest is even more useless Than life Hollow the earth beneath your shadow A sheet of water near your breasts In which to drown Like a stone.

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4. Une roulette couverte en tuiles Une roulette couverte en tuiles Le cheval mort un enfant maître Pensant le front bleu de haine A deux seins s’abattant sur lui Comme deux poings Ce mélodrame nous arrache La raison du coeur.

4. A gypsy wagon roofed with tiles A gypsy wagon roofed with tiles The horse dead a child master Thinking his brow blue with hatred Of two breasts beating down upon him Like two fists This melodrama rips Reason from our hearts.

5. A toutes brides A toutes brides toi dont le fantôme Piaffe la nuit sur un violon Viens régner dans les bois Les verges de l’ouragan Cherchent leur chemin par chez toi Tu n’es pas de celles Dont on invente les désirs *Tes soifs sont plus contradictoires Que des noyées Viens boire un baiser par ici Cède au feu qui te désespère. (*These two lines are omitted in Poulenc’s setting.)

5. Riding full tilt Riding full tilt you whose phantom Prances at night on a violin Come and reign in the woods The lashings of the tempest Seek their path by way of you You are not among those Whose desires are imagined *Your thirsts are more contradictory Than those of the drowned Come then and drink a kiss here Give way to the fire that drives you to despair.

6. Une herbe pauvre Une herbe pauvre Sauvage Apparut dans la neige C’était la santé Ma bouche fut émerveillée Du gout d’air pur qu’elle avait Elle était fanée.

6. Scant grass Scant grass Wild Appeared in the snow It was health My mouth marveled At the savour of pure air it had It was withered.

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7. Je n’ai envie que de t’aimer Je n’ai envie que de t’aimer Un orage emplit la vallée Un poisson la rivière Je t’ai faite a la taille de ma solitude Le monde entire pour se cacher Des jours des nuits pour se comprendre Pour ne plus rien voir dans tes yeux Que ce que je pense de toi Et d’un monde à ton image Et des jours et des nuits réglés par tes paupières.

7. I long only to love you I long only to love you A storm fills the valley A fish the river I have formed you to the shape of my solitude The whole world to hide in Days and nights to understand each other To see nothing more in your eyes Than what I think of you And of a world in your likeness And days and nights determined by your eyes.

8. Figure de force brûlante et farouche Figure de force brûlante et farouche Cheveux noirs où l’or coule vers le sud Aux nuits corrompues Or englouti étoile impure Dans un lit jamais partagé Aux veines des tempes Comme au bout des seins La vie se refuse Les yeux nul ne peut les crever Boire leur éclat ni leurs larmes Le sang au dessus d’eux triomphe pour lui seul Intraitable démesurée Inutile Cette santé bâtit une prison.

8. Figure of wild fiery force Figure of wild fiery force Black hair in which the gold flows towards the south On corrupt nights Engulfed gold impure star In a bed never shared To the veins of the temples As to the tips of the breasts Life denies itself No one can blind the eyes Drink their brilliance or their tears Blood triumphs over them for itself alone Intractable unbounded Useless This health builds a prison.

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9. Nous avons fait la nuit Nous avons fait la nuit je tiens ta main je veille Je te soutiens de toutes mes forces Je grave sur un roc l’étoile de tes forces Sillons profonds où la bonté de ton corps germera Je me répète ta voix cachée ta voix publique Je ris encore de l’orgueilleuse Que tu traites comme une mendiante Des fous que tu respectes des simples où tu te baignes Et dans ma tête qui se met doucement d’accord avec la tienne avec la nuit nuit Je m’émerveille de l’inconnue que tu deviens Une inconnue semblable à toi semblable à tout ce que j’aime Qui est toujours nouveau.

9. We have made night We have made night I hold your hand I watch over you I sustain you with all my strength I engrave on a rock the star of your strength Deep furrows where the goodness of your body will germinate I murmur to myself your secret voice your public voice I laugh still at the haughty woman That you treat like beggar The madmen you respect the simple souls in whom you revel And in my head that gently blends with yours and with the night I marvel at the stranger you become A stranger resembling you resembling all that I love Which is forever new.

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ὁδοιπορία [the journey] (2010) Music by Paul Sánchez

Text by Sappho Translations by Sherod Santos

The Dance The moon rose late, and the breathless girls, each taking her place around the altar. Nocturne Midnight, The moon has set, and the Pleidas. The hours pass and pass, yet still I lie alone. Evening Star You bring back everything the dawn dispersed. You bring the sheep back to the fold, the roan to pasture, the spent child to his mother. You bring the bride to the waiting bridegroom. Three Fragments for Aphrodite’s Return … when you return from Crete, meet me at the apple grove, our little temple, its leafy altar incensed with the mineral scent of your soapy hair … drifted over blue lakewater a cool wind empties out the apple trees, a cidery, heavy-eyed drowse spills from the branches and murmuring leaves … where the pastured warhorse grazes the meadow is awash with spring flowers, a serried, wind-lapped lake of blues Eros Like a headland wind thrashing through a leafed-out stand of oaks, it rises in the blood, routing the heart’s hidden affections

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Six Fragments for Atthis I loved you, Atthis, years ago, when my youth was still all flowers and sighs, and you – you seemed to me such a small ungainly girl. Can you forget what happened before? If so, then I’ll remind you how, while lying beside me, you wove a garland of crocuses which I then braded into strands of your hair. And once when you’d plaited a double necklace from a hundred blooms, I tied it around the swanning, sun-licked ring of your neck. And on more than one occasion – (there were two of them, to be exact) – while I looked on too silent with adoration to say your name, you glazed your breast and arms with oil. No holy place existed without us then, no woodland, no dance, no sound. Beyond all hope, I prayed those timeless days we spent might be made twice as long. I prayed one word; I want. Someone, I tell you, will remember us, even in another time.

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Apparition (1979) Music by George Crumb Text by Walt Whitman

I. The Night in Silence under Many a Star The night in silence under many a star, The ocean shore and the husky whispering wave whose voice I know, And the soul turning to thee O vast and well-veil'd Death, And the body gratefully nestling close to thee. Vocalise 1: Summer Sounds II. When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d When lilacs last in the dooryard bloom'd, I mourn'd, and yet shall mourn with ever-returning spring. III. Dark Mother Always Gliding Near with Soft Feet Dark Mother always gliding near with soft feet, Dark Mother, have none chanted for thee a chant of fullest welcome? Then I chant it for thee, I glorify thee above all, I bring thee a song that when though must indeed come, come unfalteringly. Dark Mother, always gliding near, with soft feet. Vocalise 2: Invocation IV. Approach Strong Deliveress! Approach, strong Deliveress! When it is so, when thou hast taken them I joyously sing the dead! Approach, strong Deliveress! Lost in the loving floating ocean of thee, Laved in the flood of thy bliss O Death. Approach, strong Deliveress! When it is so, when thou hast taken them I joyously sing the dead! Approach, strong Deliveress! Vocalise 3: Death Carol (“Song of the Nightbird”) V. Come Lovely and Soothing Death Come lovely and soothing death, Undulate round the world, serenely arriving, arriving, In the day, in the night, to all, to each, Sooner or later delicate death. Come lovely and soothing death. VI. The Night in Silence under Many a Star The night in silence under many a star, The ocean shore and the husky whispering wave whose voice I know, And the soul turning to thee O vast and well-veil'd Death, And the body gratefully nestling close to thee.

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Sonnets from the Portuguese (1991) Music by Libby Larsen

Text by Elizabeth Barrett Browning Arabic numbers represent the movement number; roman numerals represent the sonnet number. 1/I. "I thought once how Theocritus had sung..." I thought once how Theocritus had sung Of the sweet years, the dear and wished-for years, Who each one in a gracious hand appears To bear a gift for mortals, old or young: And, as I mused it in his antique tongue, I saw, in gradual vision through my tears, The sweet, sad years, the melancholy years, Those of my own life, who by turns had flung A shadow across me. Straightway I was 'ware, So weeping, how a mystic Shape did move Behind me, and drew me backward by the hair; And a voice said in mastery, while I strove, — 'Guess now who holds thee?' — 'Death,' I said. But, there, The silver answer rang, — 'Not Death, but Love.' 2/XXVIII. "My letters! all dead paper, mute and white!..." My letters! all dead paper, mute and white! And yet they seem alive and quivering Against my tremulous hands which loose the string And let them drop down on my knee to-night. This said,---he wished to have me in his sight Once, as a friend: this fixed a day in spring To come and touch my hand . . . a simple thing, Yet I wept for it! —this, . . . the paper's light . . . Said, Dear, I love thee; and I sank and quailed As if God's future thundered on my past. This said, I am thine—and so its ink has paled With lying at my heart that beat too fast. And this . . . O Love, thy words have ill availed If, what this said, I dared repeat at last! 3/XXXIV. "With the same heart, I said, I'll answer thee..." With the same heart, I said, I'll answer thee As those, when thou shalt call me by my name--- Lo, the vain promise! is the same, the same, Perplexed and ruffled by life's strategy? When called before, I told how hastily I dropped my flowers or brake off from a a game, To run and answer with the smile that came At play last moment, and went on with me Through my obedience. When I answer now, I drop a grave thought, break from solitude; Yet still my heart goes to thee—ponder how— Not as to a single good, but all my good! Lay thy hand on it, best one, and allow That no child's foot could run fast as this blood.

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4/XXXV. "If I leave all for thee, wilt thou exchange..." If I leave all for thee, wilt thou exchange And be all to me? Shall I never miss Home-talk and blessing and the common kiss That comes to each in turn, nor count it strange, When I look up, to drop on a new range Of walls and floors, another home than this? Nay, wilt thou fill that place by me which is Filled by dead eyes too tender to know change? That's hardest. If to conquer love, has tried, To conquer grief, tries more, as all things prove; For grief indeed is love and grief beside. Alas, I have grieved so I am hard to love. Yet love me—wilt thou? Open thine heart wide, And fold within, the wet wings of thy dove. 5/XL. "Oh, yes! they love through all this world of ours..." Oh, yes! they love through all this world of ours! I will not gainsay love, called love forsooth. I have heard love talked in my early youth, And since, not so long back but that the flowers Then gathered, smell still. Mussulmans and Giaours Throw kerchiefs at a smile, and have no ruth For any weeping. Polypheme's white tooth Slips on the nut if, after frequent showers, The shell is over-smooth, —and not so much Will turn the thing called love, aside to hate Or else to oblivion. But thou art not such A lover, my Belovèd! thou canst wait Through sorrow and sickness, to bring souls to touch, And think it soon when others cry 'Too late.' 6/XLIII. "How do I love thee? Let me count the ways..." How do I love thee? Let me count the ways. I love thee to the depth and breadth and height My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight For the ends of Being and ideal Grace. I love thee to the level of everyday's Most quiet need, by sun and candle-light. I love thee freely, as men strive for Right; I love thee purely, as they turn from Praise. I love thee with a passion put to use In my old griefs, and with my childhood's faith. I love thee with a love I seemed to lose With my lost saints, — I love thee with the breath, Smiles, tears, of all my life! — and, if God choose, I shall but love thee better after death.

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Cold Mountain Songs (1993) Music by Robert Morris

Text by Han-Shan Note: the original poems are untitled; the present titles are by the composer. I. (Meeting Cold Mountain) Anyone who meets Cold Mountain Will say he’s touched. A plain face, not attractive to the eye, A cloth robe wrapped about him. What he says, no one knows, Nor does he grasp their words. He responds to those who happen by, “Can you come to Cold Mountain?” II. Interlude

III. (A Coat) I have a coat, Not gauze or twill. What color? Not red, not purple. Summer sky, my shirt, Winter sky, my cape. Winter, summer, always used, For decades, only this.

IV. (Today) Today I sat before the sunny cliffs, A long time, until the mist had cleared. The trace of one clear stream bank, A thousand yards away the green ridge crest. Quiet white clouds’ dawn shadows, The floating bright nighttime moon. Body free from dust, unsoiled, How could cares disturb my mind?

V. Interlude VI. (Home) Thatched rafters, a rustic home, Horses, carts: few pass the gate. Deep woods, birds roost, Wide streams, spawning fish. Father and son pick mountain fruit, Mother tills the field, And what is inside the house? Just one bed with books.

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VII. (A Dream) Last night, I dreamt I went home, I saw my spouse at the loom, Stopping the shuttle in thought Then raising it as if without strength. I called, he turned his face. He did not know me, So many years had passed. The hair on my temples without color. VIII. (A White-Haired Man) My body, seeking refuge, rest, Cold Mountain eternally protects, Faint wind blows, stirs secluded pines, Listen closely, sounds better. Under trees, a white-haired man, Mumbling sacred texts, Ten years, unable to return, Forgotten the road he came.

IX. Interlude

X. (Cold Mountain is a House) Cold Mountain is a house, No fences or walls inside, Six gates, left, right, open, The hall is blue sky, A bare, empty room, East wall hits West wall. No valuables within To attract visitors.

When cold, he makes a feeble fire, When hungry, he cooks vegetables to eat. He doesn’t ape the gentry, Amassing homes, estates, and villas. All that hell is karma: Once begun how ended? Think it over well; Heed the basic laws. XI. Interlude

XII. (Dark and Eery) Cold Mountain, dark and eery, Climbers always get scared. Moon shines, water sparkles, Wind blows, grasses rustle. Flowers: snow on plum trees.

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Leaves: branches filled with clouds. When touched by rain: fresh and alive. Only on a sunny day can you get through.

XIII. (Girls Playing) Third month: silkworms still small, Girls come, picking flowers, Passing time against the wall, playing with butterflies. Near the river, pelting frogs and prawns, They gather plums in gauze sleeves, Dig up bamboo shoots with gold latches. No need to haggle about merit, This place outdoes my home.

XIV. (Climbing up Cold Mountain) Climbing, struggling up Cold Mountain Trail, The path that never ends. Rocks, stones, winding brooks, Rustling grass, thick, tangled. Slick moss, without rain, Pines sing, no wind. Who can transcend worldly bonds And sit here among white clouds? XV. (No One There) Cold Mountain Road, hostile, Vacant, deserted stream bank. Birds, ceaseless chatter, Yet bare, no one there. Wind in face, harsh, Snow flakes, on my clothes, No sun for days, No sign of spring in years.

XVI. (A Critic) A guest deplored Cold Mountain, “Your poetry’s far-fetched and wild.” But I observed the Ancients Were unashamed of poverty. In response he laughed and said, “Your talk is loose and wide.” “Then I wish you all the best, For money is your major quest.”

XVII. Interlude

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XVIII. (The Bird of Five Colors) The bird of five colors, elegant, Rests in the Paulownia trees and eats bamboo fruit, Now majestically moves slowly Singing in the light and dark scales. Why did it finally come yesterday, And appear to me only for a while? When it hears sounds—strings, voices— It joyfully dances the day.

XIX. (The World is Space) Clear water in an emerald spring, White moonlight on Cold Mountain. Radiant center, silent knowledge, Contemplate the void: the world is space.

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The Holy Sonnets of John Donne (1945) Music by Benjamin Britten

Text by John Donne I. Oh my blacke Soule! now thou art summoned By sicknesse, deaths herald, and champion; Thou art like a pilgrim, which abroad hath done Treason, and durst not turne to whence hee is fled, Or like a thiefe, which till deaths doome be read, Wisheth himselfe delivered from prison; But damn'd and hal'd to execution, Wisheth that still he might be imprisoned. Yet grace, if thou repent, thou canst not lacke; But who shall give thee that grace to beginne? Oh make thy selfe with holy mourning blacke, And red with blushing, as thou art with sinne; Or wash thee in Christs blood, which hath this might That being red, it dyes red soules to white. II. Batter my heart, three person'd God; for, you As yet but knocke, breathe, shine, and seeke to mend, That I may rise, and stand, o'erthrow mee, and bend Your force, to breake, blowe, burn and make me new. I, like an usurpt towne, to another due, Labour to admit you, but Oh, to no end, Reason your viceroy in mee, mee should defend, But is captiv'd , and proves weake or untrue. Yet dearely I love you, and would be loved faine, But am betroth'd unto your enemie: Divorce mee, untie, or breake that knot againe, Take mee to you, imprison mee, for I Except you enthrall mee, never shall be free, Nor ever chast, except you ravish mee. III. O might those sighes and teares returne againe Into my breast and eyes, which I have spent, That I might in this holy discontent Mourne with some fruit, as I have mourn'd in vaine; In mine Idolatry what showres of raine Mine eyes did waste? what griefs my heart did rent? That sufferance was my sinne; now I repent; 'Cause I did suffer I must suffer paine. Th'hydroptique drunkard, and night-scouting thiefe, The itchy Lecher, and selfe-tickling proud Have the remembrance of past joyes, for reliefe Of comming ills. To (poore) me is allow'd No ease; for, long, yet vehement griefe hath beene Th'effect and cause, the punishment and sinne.

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IV. Oh, to vex me, contraryes meet in one: Inconstancy unnaturally hath begott A constant habit; that when I would not I change in vowes, and in devotione. As humorous is my contritione As my prophane Love, and as soone forgott: As ridlingly distemper'd, cold and hott, As praying, as mute; as infinite, as none. I durst not view heaven yesterday; and to day In prayers, and flattering speaches I court God: To morrow I quake with true feare of his rod. So my devout fitts come and go away Like a fantistique Ague: save that here Those are my best dayes, when I shake with feare. V. What if this present were the worlds last night? Marke in my heart, O Soule, where thou dost dwell, The picture of Christ crucified, and tell Whether that countenance can thee affright, Teares in his eyes quench the amazing light, Blood fills his frownes, which from his pierc'd head fell. And can that tongue adjudge thee unto hell, Which pray'd forgiveness for his foes fierce spight? No, no; but as in my idolatrie I said to all my profane mistresses, Beauty, of pitty, foulnesse onely is A sign of rigour: so I say to thee, To wicked spirits are horrid shapes assign'd, This beauteous forme assures a piteous minde. VI. Since she whom I lov'd hath payd her last debt To Nature, and to hers, and my good is dead, And her Soule early into heaven ravished, Wholly on heavenly things my mind is sett. Here the admyring her my mind did whett To seeke thee God; so streames do shew their head; But though I have found thee, and thou my thirst hast fed, A holy thirsty dropsy melts mee yet. But why should I begg more Love, when as thou Dost wooe my soule for hers; offring all thine: And dost not only feare least I allow My Love to Saints and Angels things divine, But in thy tender jealousy dost doubt Least in the World. Fleshe, yea Devill put thee out.

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VII. At the round earths imagin'd corners, blow Your trumpets, Angells, and arise, arise From death, you numberlesse infinities Of soules, and to your scattred bodies goe, All whom the flood did, and fire shall o'erthrow, All whom warre, dearth, age, agues, tyrannies, Despaire, law, chance, hath slaine, and you whose eyes, Shall behold God, and never tast deaths woe. But let them sleepe, Lord, and mee mourne a space, For, if above all these, my sinnes abound, 'Tis late to aske abundance of thy grace, When wee are there; here on this lowly ground, Teach mee how to repent; for that's as good As if thou'hadst seal'd my pardon, with thy blood. VIII. THOU hast made me, And shall thy worke decay? Repaire me now, for now mine end doth haste, I runne to death, and death meets me as fast, And all my pleasures are like yesterday; I dare not move my dimme eyes any way, Despaire behind, and death before doth cast Such terrour, and my feeble flesh doth waste By sinne in it, which it t'wards hell doth weigh; Onely thou art above, and when towards thee By thy leave I can looke, I rise againe; But our old subtle foe so tempteth me, That not one houre my selfe I can sustaine; Thy Grace may wing me to prevent his art, And thou like Adamant draw mine iron heart. IX. Death be not proud, though some have called thee Mighty and dreadfull, for, thou art not soe, For, those, whom thou think'st, thou dost overthrow, Die not, poore death, nor yet canst thou kill mee. From rest and sleepe, which but thy pictures bee, Much pleasure, then from thee, much more must flow, And soonest our best men with thee doe goe, Rest of their bones, and soules deliverie. Thou art slave to Fate, Chance, kings, and desperate men, And dost with poyson, warre, and sicknesse dwell, And poppie, or charmes can make us sleepe as well, And better than thy stroake; why swell'st thou then? One short sleepe past, wee wake eternally, And death shall be no more; death, thou shalt die.

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We’ll to the Woods No More (1927) Music by John Ireland

Text by Alfred Edward Housman We'll to the woods no more We'll to the woods no more, The laurels all are cut, The bowers are bare of bay That once the Muses wore; The year draws in the day And soon will evening shut: The laurels all are cut, We'll to the woods no more. Oh, we'll no more, no more To the leafy woods away, To the high wild woods of laurel And the bowers of bay no more. In Boyhood When I would muse in boyhood The wild green woods among, And nurse resolves and fancies Because the world was young, It was not foes to conquer, Nor sweethearts to be kind, But it was friends to die for That I would seek and find. I sought them far and found them, The sure, the straight, the brave, The hearts I lost my own to, The souls I could not save. They braced their belts about them, They crossed in ships the sea, They sought and found six feet of ground, And there they died for me. Spring will not wait ‘Spring will not wait the loiterer's time Who keeps so long away;’ (from ‘A Shropshire Lad’)

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Pushkin Romances (1935) Music by Georgy Sviridov Text by Alexander Pushkin

Ronyaet les bagryanyi svoi ubor, The Crimson Forest is Losing its Headdress Srebrit moroz uvyanuvsheye polye, The frost silvers the withered field, Proglyanet den’ kak budto po nevolye Day will peer out as if involuntarily I skroyetsya za krai okruzhnykh gor. And will hide beyond the neighboring mountains. Pylai kamin, vmoey pustynnoi kel’e: Blaze up, you hearth, in my empty cell; A ty, vino, osenney stuzhi drug, And you, wine, the friend of autumnal chills, Proley mne v grud’ otradnoye pokhmel’e, Pour into my breast a joyous intoxication, Minutnote zabven’ye gor’kikh muk. Momentary oblivion from bitter suffering. Pechalen ya: so mnoyu druga net, I am sad: I have no friend with me, S kem dolguyu zapil by ya razluku, No one with whom I can drink to a long parting, Komu by mog pozhat’ ot serdtsa ruku Whose hand I could shake with heartfelt emotion, I pozhelat’ vesyolykh mnogo let. And wish the happy company a long life. Ya p’yu odin; votshche voobrazhen’ye I drink alone; in vain my imagination Vokrug menya tovarishchey zovyot, Calls to friends around me, Znakomoye na slyshno priblizheniye The familiar approach cannot be heard I milovo dusha myoa ne zhdyot. And my soul does not expect my dearest friend. Zimnyaya doroga A Winter’s Road Skvoz’ volnistye tumany Through swirling mists, Probirayetsya luna, The moon peers Na pechal’nye polyany And on sorrowful glades L’yot pechal’no svyet ona. Pours her melancholic light. Po doroge zimney, skuchnoy, Over the tedious winter’s road Troika borzaya bezhit, Glides a swift troika Kolokol’chik odnozvuchnyi And its monotonous little bell Utomitel’no gremit. Tinkles wearily. Ni ognya, ni chyornoy khaty, Not a light, not one black hovel, Glush’I sneg… Navstechu mne just remote solitude and snow… Tol’ko vyorsty polo saty Only the striped milestones Popadayutsya odne. Flash past me. Skutchno, grustno…Zavtra, Nina, This is tedious and boring… Tomorrow, Nina, Zavtra k miloi vozvratyas’, Tomorrow returning to my beloved, Ya zabudus’ u kamina, I shall be lost in reverie by the hearth, Zaglyazhus’, ne naglyadyas’. I shall stare insatiably, never tiring. Zvuchno strelka chasovaya Noisely the hand of the clock Mernyi krug svoi sovershit, Completes its even circle, I, dokuchnkh udalyaya, Chasing away tiresome folk, Polnoch’ nas ne razluchit. Midnight will not part us.

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Grustno, Nina; put’ moi skuchen, This is wearisome, Nina, my journey is boring, Dremlya smoiknul moi yamshchik, Drowsy, my coachman has fallen silent, Kolokol’chik odnozvuchen, The little bell is monotonous, Otumanen lunnyi lik. The moon’s face is covered by mist. K nyanya To Nanny Podruga dney moikh surovykh, My companion of harsh days, Golubka dryakhlaya moya! My senile old dear! Odna v glushi lesov sosnovykh Alone in the remoteness of the pine forests, Davno, davno ty zhdyosh’ menya. You have been waiting for me for so long. Ty pod oknom svoey svetlitsy At the window of your room Goryuyesh’, budto na chasakh, You grieve as if on sentry duty I medlyat pominutno spitsy And every moment the knitting needles V tvoikh namorshchennykh rukakh. Move more slowly in your wrinkled hands. Glyadish’ v zabytye voroty You gaze at the forgotten gate Na chyornyi otdalyonnyi put’; And at the black and distant road; Toska, predchuvstviya, zaboty Melancholy, forebodings and worry Tesnyat tvoyu vsechasno grud’. Constrict your breast each hour. Podruga dney moikh surovykh My companion of harsh days, Golubka dryakhlaya moya! My senile old dear! Odna v glushi lesov sosnovykh Alone in the remoteness of the pine forests, Davno, davno ty zhdyosh’ menya. You have been waiting for me for so long. Zimnyi vecher A Winter’s Evening Burya mgloyu nebo kroyet, The white blizzard covers the sky with murkiness, Vikhri snezhnye krutya; Making the snow swirl; To, kak zver’, ona zovoyet, One moment it howls like a beast, To zaplachet, kak ditya, Then faintly wails, like a child, To po krovle obvetshaloy It will rustle the straw Vdrug solomoi zashumit, over the old thatched roof, To kak putnik zapozdalyi, Then like a late traveler K nam v okoshko zastuchit. It will start beating at our window. Nasha vetkhaya lazhuchka Our decrepit hovel I pechal’na I temne. Is mournful and dark. Chto zhe ty, moya starushka, Why have you fallen silent by the window, Priumolkla u okna? My dear old woman? Ili buri zavyvan’yem Is it that you are tired Ty, moy, drug, utomlene, By the howling of the storm, Ili dremlyesh’ pod zhuzhzhan ‘yem Or are you slumbering Svoevo veretena, svoevo veretena? To the sound of your spindle? Spoy mne pesnyu, kak sinitsa Sing me the song about the blue tit Tikho za morem zhila; Who lived quietly beyond the sea; Spoy mne pesnyu, kak devitsa Sing me the song about the maiden who went

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Za vodoy po-utru shla. For water early each morning. Vyp’yem, dobraya podruzhka, Let us drink, good friend, Bednoy yunosti moey, To my impoverished youth, Vyp’yem s gorya; gde zhe kruzhka? Let us drink out of grief; where is the tankard? Serdtsu budet veseley. The heart will be lighter. Burya mgloyu nebo kroyet, The white blizzard covers the sky with murkiness, Vikhri snezhnye krutya; Making the snow swirl; To, kak zver’, ona zovoyet, One moment it howls like a beast, To zaplachet, kak ditya, Then faintly wails, like a child, Vyp’yem, dobraya podrushka, Let us drink, good friend, Bednoy yunosti moey, To my impoverished youth, Vyp’yem s gorya; gde zhe kruzhka? Let us drink out of grief; where is the tankard? Serdtsu budet veseley. The heart will be lighter. Pretchustvye Foreboding Snova tuchi nado mnoyu Thunder clouds have again gathered Sobralisya v tishine: Above me in silence: Rok zavistlivyi bedoyu Envious destiny again threatens Ugrozhaeyet snova mne… Me with misfortune… Sokhranyu l’ k sud’be prezren’ye? Shall I preserve my disdain for fate? Ponesu l’navstrechu ey Or shall I sacrifice Nepreklonnost’ I terpen’ye My proud youth to Gordoy yunosti moey? Submission and endurance? Burnoy zhizn’yu ytomlyonnyi, Exhausted by the turmoil of life, Ravnodushno buri zhdu: I await the storm with indifference: Mozhet byt’ eshcho spasyonnyi, Perhaps, saved once more, Snova pristan’ya naidu… I shall again find a haven… No predchuvstvuya razluku, But, sensing our parting and Neibezhnyi, groznyi chas, The inevitable, dreaded hour, Szhat’ tvoyu moy angel, ruku I hasten to press your hand Ya speshu v poslednii raz. For the last time, my angel. Angel krotkii, bezmyatezhnyi Gentle, serene angel, Tikho molvi mne; prosti, Say to me: farewell, Opechal’sya: vzor svoy nezhnyi Be sad: lift up or lower Podymi il’ opusti; Your tender gaze; I tvoyo vospominan’ye And the memory of you will be consolation Zamenit dushe moey In my soul for the strength, Silu, gordost’, upovan ye The pride, the rapture and I otvagu yunykh dney. The courage of my youthful days. Pod’ezzhaya pod Izhory While I drove toward Izhory Ya vzglyanul na nebesa I looked up at the heavens I vospomnil vashi vzory, And remembered your glances, Vashi siniye glaza. Your blue eyes.

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Khot’ ya grustno ocharovan Although I am sadly bewitched Vashey devstvennoi krasoy, By your maidenly beauty, Khot’ vampirom imenovan Although I am called a vampire Ya v gubernii Tverskoy, In the district of Tverskoi, No kolen moikh pred vami I did not dare to bend Preklonit’ ya ne posmel My knees before you, I vlyublyonnymi mol’bami And I did not wish to bother you Vas trevozhit ne khotel. With entreaties of love. Upivayas’ nepriyatno Revelling with displeasure Khmelem svetskoy suety, caught up in high society cares, Pozabudu veroyatno, I shall probably forget Vashi milye chery, your pretty features, Lyokhii stan, dvizhenii stroinost’, Your slender waist, the harmony of your movements, Ostorozhnyi razgovor, Your guarded conversation, Etu skromnuyu spokoinost’, your modest calmness, Khitryi smekh khitryi vzor. flirtatious laughter and flirtatious glances. Yesli zh net… po prezhnyu sledu Yet if I don’t find another …I will follow the old path V vashi mirnye kraya Into your peaceful regions Cherez god oypat’ zayedu and shall call again in a year’s time I vlyublyus’ do noyabrya, do noyabrya. And I shall fall in love until November.

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Das Buch der hängenden Gärten (1908–9) Music by Arnold Schoenberg

Text by Stefan George Translations by Stanley Appelbaum

1. Unterm schutz von dichten blättergründen, Wo von sternen feine flocken schneien, Sachte stimmen ihre leiden künden, Fabeltiere aus den braunen schlünden Strahlen in die marmorbecken speien, Draus die kleinen bäche klagend eilen: Kamen kerzen das gesträuch entzünden, Weisse formen das gewässer teilen. 2. Hain in diesen paradiesen Wechselt ab mit blütenwiesen, Hallen, buntbemalten fliesen, Schlanker störche schnäbel kräuseln Teiche, die von fischen schillern, Vögel-reihen matten scheines Auf den schiefen firsten trillern Und die goldnen binsen säuseln - Doch mein traum verfolgt nur eines. 3. Als neuling trat ich ein in dein gehege; Kein staunen war vorher in meinen mienen, Kein wunsch in mir, eh ich dich blickte, rege. Der jungen hände faltung sieh mit huld, Erwähle mich zu denen, die dir dienen Und schone mit erbarmender geduld Den, der noch strauchelt auf so fremdem stege. 4. Da meine lippen reglos sind und brennen, Beacht ich erst, wohin mein fuss geriet: In andrer herren prächtiges gebiet. Noch war vielleicht mir möglich, mich zu trennen; Da schien es, daß durch hohe gitterstäbe Der blick, vor dem ich ohne lass gekniet, Mich fragend suchte oder zeichen gäbe. 5. Saget mir, auf welchem pfade Heute sie vorüberschreite - Daß ich aus der reichsten lade Zarte seidenweben hole, Rose pflücke und viole, Daß ich meine wange breite, Schemel unter ihrer sohle.

1. Under the protection of dense clusters of leaves, where delicate flakes snow down from stars, gentle voices proclaim their sorrows, fabulous animals spew streams from their brown maws into the marble basins from which the little brooks hasten away lamentingly: there came tapers to ignite the bushes, white forms to part the waters. 2. Grove in these paradises alternates with flowery meadows, pavilions, brightly painted flagstones. Slender storks’ bills ripple ponds that gleam with fish, rows of birds in a dull glow trill on the oblique roof ridges and the golden sedges rustle – but my dream pursues only one thing. 3. As a novice I entered your enclosure; previously there was no amazement in my attitudes, no wish stirring in me before I caught sight of you. Look graciously upon the clasping of my young hands, choose me as one of those who serve you, and with merciful patience spare the one who is still stumbling on such an unfamiliar path.

4. Since my lips are immobile and burn, I being to observe where my feet have come to: into the splendid domain of other masters. It was perhaps still possible to break away, but then it seemed as if through high gate rails the glance before which I knelt untiringly was seeking me questioningly or was giving signs.

5. Tell me on which path she will walk by today, so that I can fetch soft silk weaves from the richest chest, can pick roses and violets, so that I can lay down my cheeks as a footstool beneath her soles.

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6. Jedem werke bin ich fürder tot. Dich mir nahzurufen mit den sinnen, Neue reden mit dir auszuspinnen, Dienst und lohn, gewährung und verbot, Von allen dingen ist nur dieses not Und weinen, daß die bilder immer fliehen, Die in schöner finsternis gediehen - Wann der kalte klare morgen droht. 7. Angst und hoffen wechselnd mich beklemmen, Meine worte sich in seufzer dehnen, Mich bedrängt so ungestümes sehnen, Daß ich mich an rast und schlaf nicht kehre, Daß mein lager tränen schwemmen, Daß ich jede freude von mir wehre, Daß ich keines freundes trost begehre. 8. Wenn ich heut nicht deinen leib berühre, Wird der faden meiner seele reissen Wie zu sehr gespannte sehne. Liebe zeichen seien trauerflöre Mir, der leidet, seit ich dir gehöre. Richte, ob mir solche qual gebühre, Kühlung sprenge mir, dem fieberheissen, Der ich wankend draussen lehne. 9. Streng ist uns das glück und spröde, Was vermocht ein kurzer kuss? Eines regentropfens guss Auf gesengter bleicher öde, Die ihn ungenossen schlingt, Neue labung missen muss Und vor neuen gluten springt. 10. Das schöne beet betracht ich mir im harren, Es ist umzäunt mit purpurn-schwarzem dorne, Drin ragen kelche mit geflecktem sporne Und sammtgefiederte, geneigte farren Und flockenbüschel, wassergrün und rund Und in der mitte glocken, weiss und mild - Von einem odem ist ihr feuchter mund Wie süsse frucht vom himmlischen gefild.

6. I am henceforth dead to all efforts. To call you near me with my senses, to spin out new conversations with you, service and payment, permission and prohibition, of all things only this is necessary, and to weep because the images that flourished in the beautiful darkness always vanish when the cold, clear morning threatens.

7. Anxiety and hope oppress me in alternation, my words are prolonged into sighs, I am afflicted with such impetuous longing that I pay no heed to rest and sleep, that tears soak my bed, that I keep every joy away from me, that I desire no friend’s comforting.

8. If I do not touch your body today, the thread of my soul will tear like a sinew that has been stretched too far. Let mourning crepes be beloved signs for me, who have been suffering since I have belonged to you. Judge whether I deserve such torment; sprinkle cool water on me, I am hot with fever and unsteadily leaning outside. 9. Fortune is severe and obstinate with us; what could a brief kiss do? The fall of a raindrop on a parched, bleached desert, which swallows it without pleasure, which must do without new refreshment and which cracks open from new heat waves. 10. I contemplate the beautiful flowerbed as I tarry; it is enclosed by purple-black thorn in which flower cups with speckled spurs tower, and velvet-feathered inclining ferns and fluffy-tufted flowers watery-green and round, and in the center bellflowers white and gentle – their moist mouth is of a fragrance like that of the sweet fruit from the fields of heaven.

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11. Als wir hinter dem beblümten tore Endlich nur das eigne hauchen spürten, Warden uns erdachte seligkeiten? Ich erinnere, daß wie schwache rohre Beide stumm zu beben wir begannen Wenn wir leis nur an uns rührten Und daß unsre augen rannen - So verbliebest du mir lang zu seiten. 12. Wenn sich bei heilger ruh in tiefen matten Um unsre schläfen unsre hände schmiegen, Verehrung lindert unsrer glieder brand: So denke nicht der ungestalten schatten, Die an der wand sich auf und unter wiegen, Der wächter nicht, die rasch uns scheiden dürfen Und nicht, daß vor der stadt der weisse sand Bereit ist, unser warmes blut zu schlürfen. 13. Du lehnest wider eine silberweide Am ufer, mit des fächers starren spitzen Umschirmest du das haupt dir wie mit blitzen Und rollst, als ob du spieltest dein geschmeide. Ich bin im boot, das laubgewölbe wahren, In das ich dich vergeblich lud zu steigen... Die weiden seh ich, die sich tiefer neigen Und blumen, die verstreut im wasser fahren. 14. Sprich nicht immer Von dem laub, Windes raub; Vom zerschellen Reifer quitten, Von den tritten Der vernichter Spät im jahr. Von dem zittern Der libellen In gewittern, Und der lichter, Deren flimmer Wandelbar.

11. When behind the flowered gate, we finally felt only our own breathing, did we obtain the blisses we had imagined? I recall that we both began to tremble like weak reeds whenever we merely touched each other lightly, and that our eyes teared – you remained at my side a long time that way. 12. Whenever, resting blissfully in deep meadows, we join our hands around our temples, veneration mitigates the burning of our limbs: and so, do not think about the misshapen shadows that rock up and down on the wall, (do) not (think) about the watchers who may separate us swiftly, and (do) not (reflect) that the white sand outside the city is ready to sip our warm blood. 13. You lean against a white willow by the bank; with the stiff points of your fan you protect your head as if with lightning bolts, and you roll your jewelry as if you were playing. I am in the boat which arches of foliage are guarding and which I invited you in vain to step into . . . I see the willows, which are bending lower, and flowers that are floating scattered on the water.

14. Do not always speak about the leaves, prey of the wind, about the shattering of ripe quinces, about the steps of the annihilators late in the year. About the trembling of the dragonflies in storms and (the trembling) of lights whose gleam is changeable.

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15. Wir bevölkerten die abend-düstern Lauben, lichten tempel, pfad und beet Freudig - sie mit lächeln, ich mit flüstern - Nun ist wahr, daß sie für immer geht. Hohe blumen blassen oder brechen, Es erblasst und bricht der weiher glas Und ich trete fehl im morschen gras, Palmen mit den spitzen fingern stechen. Mürber blätter zischendes gewühl Jagen ruckweis unsichtbare hände Draußen um des edens fahle wände. Die nacht ist überwölkt und schwül.

15. We peopled the evening-gloomy arbors, bright temples, path and flowerbed joyfully—she with smiling, I with whispering— Now it is true that she is going forever. Tall flowers pale or break, the glass of the pools grows pale and breaks, and I stumble in the decaying grass; palms jab with their pointy fingers. Unseen hands jerkily drive the hissing throng of withered leaves outside around the dun walls of the Eden. The night is cloudy and sultry.

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Abstracts and Short Bios (in program order)

Modern and Sentimental Voices in Scott Wheeler’s Wasting the Night Benjamin Binder

In a recent interview, the American composer Scott Wheeler (b. 1952) heard a recording of

Edna St. Vincent Millay reading “Recuerdo [I remember],” one of five poems that Wheeler chose for his Millay song cycle Wasting the Night (1990), and he was surprised by the way she rolled her Rs. In the voice of an American poet, this Briticism bothered Wheeler, who opined that Millay’s diction would sound strange if used in a performance of his song. For listeners today, Millay’s formal, grand manner of recitation does indeed seem like a maudlin Victorian affectation, at odds with the frank, casual intimacy and worldly sophistication of the mid-20th century New York cabaret milieu that served as a central inspiration for Wheeler’s cycle. Yet Mabel Mercer, one of the cabaret singers that Wheeler mentions in this regard, was famous for her proper English accent, replete with rolled Rs. Why does Mercer’s voice harmonize so well with Wheeler’s conception of his cycle, whereas the voice of Millay, the very author of the cycle’s texts, only alienates him (and us)?

In the 1920s-1940s, Millay’s audiences were enthralled by her sentimental recitation style; as Derek Furr (2006) explains, “its drama and incantatory lilt were evidence to her listeners that she embodied the muse.” Specifically, Millay’s voice evoked the nineteenth-century trope of the Poetess whose lyrics offer sincere confessions from the private depths of a feminine soul (Zellinger 2012). Millay deployed this voice, however, as an accessible platform from which to critique conventional concepts of the feminine (Gilbert and Gubar 1994). Particularly in her earlier poetry of the 1920s (from which Wheeler selected all the texts for Wasting the Night), Millay personifies the “New Woman” of the Jazz Age: independent, empowered, and brazenly promiscuous, unencumbered by the memory of past loves and eager to begin her next affair. This figure stands in marked contrast to the persona conjured up by the cabaret songs of Mercer, Blossom Dearie, and André Previn that Wheeler cites as influences on Wasting the Night. That persona is experienced, to be sure, but also wistful, nostalgic, and ready to settle down.

In this paper, I analyze Wheeler’s cycle to show how the composer constructs this cabaret persona by unifying the disparate voices and critical perspectives of Millay’s original poems into a single narrative centered on “Recuerdo” and its idealized memory of a lovers’ night on the town. Wheeler captures the cabaret persona not through the use of vernacular styles, as Bernstein or Bolcom might have done, but rather by means of tightly interwoven cross-references between songs that recall the Romantic song cycle and its treatment of the psychology of memory, particularly Schumann’s Frauenliebe und Leben (Muxfeldt 2001, Hallmark 2013). Wheeler’s cycle thus reveals a similarity between the heroine of Frauenliebe, the old-fashioned Poetess (vs. the modern New Woman), and the cabaret diva. Perhaps Millay’s rolled Rs rankled Wheeler because they were an uncanny reminder of an antiquated sentimentality that still has the power to speak to us today, as his cycle demonstrates.

Benjamin Binder is Associate Professor of Music at Duquesne University. As a

musicologist, his research interests include art song (especially the Lied), German Romanticism, and performance studies. He has published in Nineteenth-Century Music Review, JAMS, Music Theory Online, Current Musicology, and Rethinking Schubert (Oxford). He also served as a scholar and writer for Thomas Hampson’s Song: Mirror of the World program on the WFMT Radio Network. As a collaborative pianist, he performs with the Pittsburgh Song Collaborative and served as director of the Song Scholarship and Performance Program at the Vancouver International Song Institute. He

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holds a Ph.D. in musicology from Princeton University and an M.M. in piano performance from Washington University.

Soprano Martha Guth’s recital partners include Graham Johnson, Malcom Martineau, Erika Switzer, Spencer Myer, and Margo Garrett, in venues like Wigmore Hall, Lincoln Center, Leeds Lieder, and St. John’s Smith Square. Broadcast on CBC Radio/Radio Canada, the BBC Radio in the U.K the WDR in Germany and NPR in the US. She has performed with major Symphonies under Maestro’s Seiji Ozawa, Robert Spano, Helmut Rilling, John Nelson, Richard Bradshaw, Alan Gilbert and others. Her discography includes Schubert songs with Penelope Crawford on forte Piano for Musica Omnia, Roberto Sierra’s ‘Beyond the Silence of Sorrow’ with the Orquesta Sinfonica de Puerto Rico for Naxos, nominated for a Latin GRAMMY, John Fitz-Roger’s ‘Magna Mysteria’ for Innova, and the Five Borough’s Song Book for GVR records. She is Co-Director of Sparks & Wiry Cries, a global platform for art song spanning dissemination, performance and commission of new works.

The Queer Context and Composition of Samuel Barber’s Despite and Sti l l James Sullivan

Since its premiere, Samuel Barber’s Despite and Still has been criticized for its incongruous texts. Poems by Robert Graves and Theodore Roethke and an excerpt from James Joyce’s Ulysses form an unlikely group and address such varied topics as romantic jealousy, infidelity, pious suffering, and creative muse. Textual structure ranges from rhymed verse to telegraph-style prose, and poetic images vary widely. What motivates the grouping of such disparate texts? Barber’s biographer, Barbara Heyman, points to several negative circumstances in Barber’s life, among them Barber’s crumbling relationship with Gian Carlo Menotti. While Heyman acknowledges Barber’s sexuality, she gives it only passing attention. Such ambivalence has prompted prior criticism. Yet, Heyman’s critics never demonstrate the impact of Barber’s sexuality on his music in any concrete way. I wish to do exactly that for one of Barber’s best cycles. I argue that Barber’s sexuality and his relationship with Menotti are the motivating forces for Despite and Still. They influence not only the choice of texts, but also Barber’s setting of them. Specifically, each text touches upon a particular point of tension in Barber’s relationship with Menotti, and each song cathartically dramatizes that tension through the manipulation of meter. Such metrical-dissonance-generating manipulations have been explored by Danuta Mirka in the context of Haydn and Mozart’s instrumental chamber music but apply equally to Barber’s vocal music. I focus especially on Despite and Still’s three Graves settings—“A Last Song,” “In the Wilderness,” and “Despite and Still”—in which close imitation generates direct displacement dissonance and evokes inner and outward conflict. Throughout, I pursue queer analysis by contextualizing the expressive role of standard compositional techniques relative to queer biography, rather than by scouring the music for queer signs. I ultimately counter Heyman’s claim that discussions of sexuality “obscure rather than reveal the individuality of the composer’s voice.”

James Sullivan is Assistant Professor of Music Theory and Double Bass at the University of Evansville. He is finishing a PhD in music theory at Eastman, with a dissertation on meter perception in post-tonal music. Prior degrees include a DMA, MM, and BM in double bass and a BS in mathematics. James has presented at conferences of the Society for Music Theory, the Society for Music Perception and Cognition, and the International Society of Bassist. He has received the University of Rochester’s Edward Peck Curtis Award for Excellence in Teaching, Eastman’s Teaching Assistant Prize, and Eastman’s Lecture Recital Prize.

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Matthew Valverde, tenor, is Assistant Professor of Voice at Adams State University in Alamosa, Colorado. He was awarded a Doctor of Musical Arts degree from the Eastman School of Music and holds degrees from Texas Christian University. Matthew has been featured in performances including Handel’s Messiah, Haydn’s The Creation, Mendelssohn’s Elijah, Mozart’s Requiem, and Britten’s Serenade and War Requiem. Orchestral credits include: Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra, Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra, Rochester Chamber Orchestra, Rochester Oratorio Society, and the Finger Lakes Choral Festival. He has appeared with the Rochester Lyric Opera, Finger Lakes Opera (Geneseo, NY), and the Eastman Opera Theatre. Pianist and vocal coach Allan Armstrong is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Collaborative Piano at the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music. He is the official accompanist of the Metropolitan Opera National Council auditions for the Colorado/Wyoming district and Rocky Mountain Region. Previously he was a member of the applied piano faculty at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley where he co-directed the nationally award-winning UTRGV Bravo Opera Company. Allan has been a principal production coach at Eugene Opera, Opera Colorado, St. Petersburg Opera, Opera on the Avalon, and Opera Tampa.

There and Then, Here and Now: Higdon’s Civi l Words Laura Dallman

Jennifer Higdon’s Civil Words (2014) is a tightly knit song cycle of five movements that

reflects Higdon’s tendency to fashion novel sounds out of familiar musical materials. Within the cycle, it is also evident that Higdon combines old and new techniques, including parallel and major sonorities, superimposition of chords, and rhythmic variation, to create novel soundscapes. The movements of Civil Words have both common threads that link all the songs together and particular characteristics that connect pairs of songs.

Musically, the vocal lines of Civil Words move primarily in seconds and thirds, generating speech-like melodies. Movements end much like they begin, creating a sense of circular time. Each song also pairs uniquely with one other song. For instance, the second and fourth movements include plucked piano strings, a distinctive color that could suggest a heartbeat. Higdon uses familiar sounds in new contexts, too, such as parallel major chords in non-traditional harmonic progressions, producing modern music with which listeners may feel a ready kinship.

Textually, Higdon sets works by five writers: an anonymous author, Thaddeus Oliver, Abraham Lincoln, William Cullen Bryant, and Kate Putnam Osgood. The range of sources is diverse, both in terms of the authors’ genders and vocations. For example, Oliver was a civil war solider while Bryant was a poet and journalist. The texts also address a variety of human emotions, from anxiety and sorrow to elation and joy. Though the poetry and prose all speak about aspects of the Civil War, none exhibit divisiveness or exclusiveness. The writing is universal, dealing with the war in ways that invite all readers to participate without degrading Union or Confederate soldiers. The words are civil, causing one to wonder if Higdon might be making a larger point about diversity and the civility of discourse in our modern times.

Laura Dallman received a Bachelor of Music in piano from Ball State University (2007) and

both a Master of Arts and a Doctor of Philosophy in musicology from Indiana University (2009, 2017). Her dissertation, “The Significance of Accessibility in American Orchestral Music,” addresses accessibility in regards to the symphony and symphonic works by Aaron Copland, Michael Daugherty, and Jennifer Higdon. Dr. Dallman has presented her research at conferences in the United States, Ireland, and the United Kingdom. She currently teaches music history, music

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appreciation, and class piano at Indiana University—Purdue University Fort Wayne and Ball State University.

Gabe Reitemeier is a second-year masters student at Michigan State University. He earned

a Bachelor of Arts in Voice from Grand Valley State University, where he appeared in leading roles in their fully-staged productions, as well as being called upon to sing and arrange music for annual, large-scale university events. He is excited to be continuing his education at MSU under the tutelage of Marc Embree and the College of Music Faculty, and hopes to build a career in performing on the stages of both opera and musical theatre upon completing his degree.

Born in Shenyang, China, Qian Zhao’s musical talent was evident at age four. She was

admitted to the Shenyang Conservatory of Music in 2010, where she studied with Dr. Li Zhe. She won the “Outstanding Graduates” Award and received her Bachelor’s Degree in Piano Performance. By 2014, Qian had won numerous national and international piano performance competitions, and she was offered a scholarship at Syracuse University to study with Professor Steven Heyman. Currently, Qian is a graduate assistant in the collaborative piano program at Michigan State University, under the mentorship of Professors Zhihua Tang and Derek Polischuk.

The 4 Verses o f Captain Lebyadkin : Nihilism and Creative Transcendence in Late Shostakovich

Michael Chikinda

Considerable evidence in his compositions suggests that Shostakovich was preoccupied with mortality near the end of his life; specifically, it appears that he believed each work could be the last he would write. Consider, for instance, the quotation of the “Funeral March” from Götterdämmerung in the Fourteenth Symphony, Op. 135. A curious exception is found in the Four Verses of Captain Lebyadkin, Op. 146. It is a work full of the irony and cynicism that typified earlier works such as Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District, Op. 29. The verses are taken from Dostoyevsky’s novel The Demons: the first three are understood to be written by Lebyadkin, whereas the fourth is a parody of Nikolay Ogaryov’s poem The Student. Thus, this cycle is a contemplation of Dostoyevskian existentialism that focuses not on the nature of existence, but on what the ideal existence should entail, and how such was never possible in the reality of Soviet oppression. My discussion will examine the entirety of the cycle, and focus largely on Shostakovich’s melodic/motivic practice (e.g., the presence of the [0134] tetrachord as signifier of the DSCH motive). I will argue that the transparency of the musical surface belies the deep meaning transmitted in the motivic design used to set the text. Michael Chikinda is Assisant Professor of Music Theory at the University of Utah School of Music. His research interests include the music of Arvo Pärt: an article on the composer’s And one of the Pharisee’s was published in Perspectives of New Music; issues of form in tonal music as it relates to music-theory pedagogy: an article in this regard was published in the College Music Symposium. In addition, an article on sequences is forthcoming in the journal Musical Insights. Lastly, in regards to his research on the American composer Vincent Persichetti, an article about the perplexing incident at Richard Nixon’s Second Inauguration in 1973 is forthcoming in the journal Music & Politics.

Bass-baritone Seth Keeton’s performances have been described by The New York Times as “driven” and “emotionally pointed.” He has performed opera roles throughout the United States and Germany. As a scholar, Keeton is working to create an online song index that will make it easy to find related song repertoire. This index will become an essential reference, helping singers and

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pianists find forgotten song repertoire as well as discover new vocal works. Mr. Keeton received his DMA from the University of Minnesota and is an Assistant Professor of Voice at the University of Utah School of Music.

Vedrana Subotic graduated from the former Yugoslavia’s State Music Conservatory at age fifteen, and received a Bachelor of Music degree from Belgrade University four years later. She has since earned a Master of Music from Michigan State University, and an Artist Diploma and Doctor of Music from Indiana University. Over the course of her musical career, Dr. Subotic has distinguished herself as an acclaimed concert artist, pedagogue, chamber musician, and concert producer. As a concert pianist, she has won acclaim from critics and audiences for her “fierce playing,” and “impressive chops,” and her “nuanced and expressive playing, beautifully phrased lines, and a wonderfully light touch.” As a faculty member at the University of Utah, Dr. Subotic has received a number of teaching grants for projects ranging from performing the Beethoven sonatas, to bringing distinguished artists to present masterclasses to the students in the piano program.

Textual and Musical Portrayals of Contradiction in Bolcom’s From the Diary o f Sal ly Hemings

Michael Callahan

Published in the first year of the twenty-first century, From the Diary of Sally Hemings is a fictional first-person account of the 38-year relationship between Thomas Jefferson and his slave, Hemings, following the early death of his wife—and her half-sister—Martha. With no actual surviving diary in Hemings’s hand, Seaton imagines one in noncontiguous sketches, speculating on Hemings’s reflections on events throughout the span of her time with Jefferson: Martha’s death during Hemings’s childhood, Hemings’s time with the widower in Paris, their return to Monticello, the children that he fathered, and her confrontation with their deaths and the ghost of Martha.

Seaton’s Hemings is a strong, multivalent character who wrestles throughout the cycle with the inherent contradictions of her life. The range of emotions expressed (anger, love, grief, jealousy, frustration) and of roles described (slave, lover, mother) is wide, but there is an underlying and unremitting sense of incongruity—both musical and textual—that, perhaps paradoxically, serves to unify the dramatic content of the cycle. Musical as well as textual processes contribute to this.

My presentations highlights expressive features of William Bolcom’s musical setting, both pitch and rhythmic, that portray and amplify the essential poetic tensions of Seaton’s libretto. While aiming to elucidate processes that pervade the eighteen-song cycle, I offer more detailed case studies of contradictory moments taken from each of its four parts.

Michael Callahan is Associate Professor and Area Chairperson of Music Theory at Michigan State University. He has published work on music theory pedagogy, improvisation, eighteenth-century counterpoint, and the Great American Songbook, including chapters in two recent books: The Norton Guide to Teaching Music Theory (ed. Lumsden and Swinkin) and Studies in Historical Improvisation: From ‘Cantare Super Librum’ to Partimenti (ed. Guido).

Soprano, actress, and playwright Joelle Lamarre presented a work of her own in 2017, The Violet Hour, which explores the career of internationally acclaimed operatic soprano, Leontyne Price. Lamarre is known in New Music circles for her role in George Lewis’ opera, Afterwords. As a guest alum, she played the role of Sister Rose in Northwestern’s premiere of Dead Man Walking. She joined with Charles Gaines in LA’s RedCAT museum to perform his work, Manifestos 2. With the Lyric

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Opera of Chicago, Lamarre debuted as Lady on the Levee in Show Boat and of Lily in Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess. Lamarre is known for her extensive background in musical theater: her debut as Madame de la Grand Bouche in Beauty and the Beast with the Chicago Shakespeare Theater; Lily in Porgy in Bess with Court Theatre; and Aunt Elizabeth in The Nativity with Goodman Theatre, Congo Square Theatre collaboration, and Universal Studios of Japan. Lamarre earned her Master’s from Northwestern University.

Dr. Sheryl Iott is an active teacher, solo and collaborative performer, speaker and

adjudicator, and serves on the piano faculties of Interlochen Arts Camp and Grand Rapids Community College. She is a member of the Board of Examiners for the Royal Conservatory of Toronto, for whom she also serves as an online teacher certification facilitator. Much of her collaborative work—with trumpet, low brass, saxophone, and vocalists—involves contemporary music. She spent last spring at the University of Brasília, Brazil on a Fulbright Scholarship, teaching piano pedagogy and coaching collaborative piano/chamber music, and also performed concerts with Paula Van Goes, Ricardo Douarde Freire, and Anderson Alves. Her teachers included Ralph and Tina Votapek, Ian Hobson, and Joseph Evans. She has published in music education and piano pedagogy, is currently working on a book on music cognition and effective practice strategies, and maintains an active private piano studio in her home in Grand Rapids.

Poulenc Problems: Analyzing the Un-Organic in Tel Jour Tel l e Nuit Peter Kaminsky

Although Poulenc arguably is the foremost twentieth-century French art-song composer, he is more esteemed by performers than analysts. One reason is his “un-organic” three-stage compositional method: internalizing the poem; conceiving individual phrases in specific keys which are never transposed for the final version; and stitching the fragments together. Previous Poulenc analyses tend to emphasize poetic/prosodic sensitivity and vocal beauty while eschewing theoretical approaches; highlight a mere “sense” of organicism while devaluing the composition’s aesthetic success; or emphasize traditional means of cyclic coherence, thereby underplaying his idiosyncratic approach. These problems pervade research on Poulenc’s Tel Jour Telle Nuit (1937) setting nine poems by Paul Éluard. Its title evidences Poulenc’s attraction to binary oppositions (day/night). In focusing on musical/poetic binaries, I reframe Poulenc’s purported shortcomings. His frequently fragmentary music reflects the binaries of Éluard’s elusive Surrealist poetry; and the music’s correspondence and non-correspondence with the poetry structures the cycle beyond oft-cited framing devices of key/motive/tempo linking the first and last songs. Poulenc’s vocal writing is central to his art. I deploy linear analysis to demonstrate the ascent-to-highpoint strategy in most of the cycle’s songs, and the relative consonance or dissonance with its tonal support in relation to Eluard’s poetry. More broadly, I consider interrelated features that manifest as binary oppositions: expressive mode (lyricism vs. despair/anger); tempo (four songs at quarter = 60 bpm vs. faster); modality (minor songs 2-9 framed by major beginning/ending); and texture (consistent vs. mobile). I also will interrogate Poulenc’s own binary distinction between “springboard songs” (melodies tremplins) and the supposedly more salient “pillar” songs to which they lead. The springboard songs (#3, 5 and 8) constitute some of the most structurally original songs of the cycle; they exemplify the Poulenc problems of the title; and they are far more crucial to cyclic structure than has been acknowledged.

Peter Kaminsky is Professor of Music and Associate Department Head at the University of Connecticut – Storrs. He edited and contributed two chapters to the 2011 essay collection

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Unmasking Ravel: New Perspectives on the Music, in the Eastman Studies in Music series. He has published on the music of Ravel, Debussy, Schumann, Mozart, Paul Simon and Sting in journals including Music Theory Spectrum, Music Analysis, Music Theory Online, College Music Symposium, and Theory and Practice. In Fall 2013 he was visiting guest professor at Harvard University. Other interests include jazz guitar and road biking.

Mezzo-soprano Christine Roberts has performed the title roles in Gluck’s Iphigénie en Tauride and in Gilbert and Sullivan’s Iolanthe, Cherubino in Mozart’s Le nozze di Figaro, Hansel in Humperdinck’s Hansel and Gretel, Hermia in Britten’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and Jiao Mu in Xiang's The Savage Land. As a concert soloist, she performed in Handel's Messiah with Michigan State University. Competition successes include First Place in both the Chicago NATS Junior Division and DePaul Kleinman Vocal Competition. She was also selected as a Vocal Finalist through YoungArts in 2011. Roberts is pursuing a DMA degree in vocal performance at MSU, studying with Jane Bunnell.

Pianist Neill Campbell is a graduate of Michigan State University (MM '14, BM '11), and

was most recently a staff pianist/coach at the Janiec Opera Company at Brevard Music Center, where he worked on productions of Don Pasquale and Street Scene. For the past two years, Neill was a Resident Artist at Shreveport Opera, and the pianist for the Shreveport Opera Xpress program. At Shreveport, he served as chorus master and rehearsal pianist for Shreveport Opera's mainstage productions, as well as pit pianist and recitative harpsichordist. Neill has performed across the United States, and internationally in Italy and in Havana, Cuba, with Michigan State University.

Sappho as a Figure of Hope in Paul Sánchez’s The Journey Mike Morey

Despite the scanty and rather mythical biographical evidence on the ancient Greek poet

Sappho, today she reemerges as a realized figure of hope and desire for humanity. The personal tone and sense of urgency in her most self-revealing lyrics—especially those describing love—give the impression of complete involvement, and it is through this poetic intimacy that we discover a personality that resonates with us today. Through a constellation of surviving papyri fragments, what emerges is not a voice dominated by poetic conventions of thematic unity and prosody, but rather a poetess that talks, laughs, and even insults. This fragmentary nature of Sappho’s surviving corpus can offer translators and composers of song a chance to fill in the gaps, to provide new renderings and meanings that can continue to resonate with our current time.

The song cycle The Journey by American composer/pianist/teacher Paul Tuntland Sánchez consists of six musical settings of several Sapphic fragments based on renderings by American poet and playwright Sherod Santos. Mr. Santos’s lucid English translations reflect a key aesthetic of lyric poetry from the archaic Greek period, that is, a “preference for the live and mutable nature of the spoken word over the fixed, inalterable nature of the written.” The early Greeks wrote poems that were meant to be memorized, recited, and improvised. This has certainly informed Santos’s translations, or, rather, “collaborations,” as he prefers to call them, in that they are firmly grounded and informed by the body of scholarship surrounding the fragments since their discovery, while at the same time aiming for a kind of self-sufficiency that pursues more the tonal than the denotative meanings in the text. The musical and textual narrative that Sánchez constructs with these selected translations reveals a lyric musical subject that speaks of a specific kind of Sapphic desire and hope that transcends the boundaries of time.

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Sánchez states that this cycle “traces a journey on many levels: from night to day and darkness to light; from youth and innocence to maturity; from the absence of love to love fulfilled; from marble and temples to nature, a journey transcending the security and limits of perceived social constructs to come into one’s own; from moments in the life of Sappho to moments in our own lives.” This presentation aims to explicate this journey, from tracing how the use of thematic prolongation and textual space lead to the catharsis in the last song, ultimately noting specifically how the emerging lyric subject has allowed Sánchez to essentially recompose the figure of Sappho in order to complete this journey. Furthermore, I will argue that Sánchez has helped to reveal how Sappho’s notion of love and desire can be explored further by composers of song cycles from the archaic Greek period, that is, a “preference for the live and wide variety of musical languages, narratives, and textual translations” to be employed, thus leaving plentiful opportunities to “fill in more gaps” of Sappho’s poetry.

Mike Morey holds a DMA in guitar performance from the University of North Texas and is currently pursuing a PhD in the field of historical musicology. He has released three recordings featuring all original compositions and is currently completing his doctoral dissertation titled “Allusions and Borrowing in the Music of Christopher Rouse: Interpreting Manner, Motive, and Meaning through a Narratological Lens,” which explores the role of narrativity as a new methodological framework for music borrowing procedures in Rouse’s orchestral music. Morey’s primary scholarly interests include Bach studies, ritual in capoeira, and narrativity studies as applied toward twentieth-century instrumental music.

“Soprano Kayleen Sánchez has the perfect voice, pure and unshakably direct in delivery.... [her] purity of voice and total control of her instrument is utterly remarkable” (Fanfare Magazine). Sánchez is an active performer, recording artist, and pedagogue. In 2016/17, she released four new CDs on the Albany and Soundset Recordings labels: Magus Insipiens and West Meets East, which feature works by Paul Sánchez, Schubert’s Schwanengesang with fortepianist Johnandrew Slominski, and Died for Love, featuring the lute-song duo Bedlam. Sánchez studied with Rita Shane and Carol Webber at the Eastman School, and is on faculty at the College of Charleston (SC).

Praised as “a great artist” (José Feghali, 2013), Paul Sánchez has concertized widely, and is an active recording artist, with 6 commercial releases. His CD Magus Insipiens, featuring 3 of his song cycles, was reviewed by Fanfare’s Colin Clarke as “one of the most beautiful discs in my collection....” and by Henry Fogel as “hauntingly beautiful music.... works of originality and a distinctive musical personality.” Sánchez is Director of Piano Studies at the College of Charleston (SC). He studied with Tamás Ungár, Alicia de Larrocha, and Douglas Humpherys, completing his doctorate at the Eastman School. He is a New Piano Collective artist.

Imaginative and Intellectual Oscillation in George Crumb’s Appari t ion Peter Lea and Julia Bentley

Walt Whitman’s poem “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d” has invited musical

settings by composers such as George Crumb, Paul Hindemith, and Roger Sessions, which balance “the notion of language as sound and feeling as opposed to language as semantics and intellect” (Rugoff 2000, 136). Howard J. Waskow identifies in the text of “Lilacs” an organic style that requires imaginative engagement and a mechanistic style that requires intellectual engagement (1966, 240). In

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this paper, we argue that Crumb’s setting of “Lilacs” in Apparition features an oscillation between the imaginative and the intellectual throughout each movement of the cycle and expands upon the self-referential closure typical of 19th-century song cycles to embrace a more open, dialectical framework.

This paper is informed by our collective imaginative and intellectual experiences as a vocalist/theorist and a theorist/pianist with Apparition and, as such, the performer is not only an object of study but has “a voice in the research that is produced” (Leong and Korevaar 2005, para 16). Our inquiry problematizes both the binary opposition between performance|analysis and imagination|intellect through a consideration of musical activities such as improvisation, rehearsal, and play in our analysis (Barolsky and Klorman 2016). We focus on the first and last songs of Apparition, both titled “The Night in Silence under Many a Star …”, to demonstrate how the oscillation between the imaginative and intellectual modes are manifest in the performance gestures of the vocalist and the pianist, extra-textual phonemes and text, asymmetric and symmetric rhythmic segments, and pencil and ink notations in Crumb’s sketches. As we demonstrate, the oscillation between imaginative and intellectual modes, whether realized in performance or discussed in analysis, is based upon the mutual relationships between the performer(s), analyst(s), and the score(s).

Mezzo-soprano Julia Bentley is an Assistant Teaching Professor of Voice and Graduate Voice Pedagogy at the University of Missouri. Her engagements range from the operatic stage (in roles such as Cendrillon and Carmen), to Grammy-nominated recordings with the New Budapest Orpheum Society, to performances of Le Marteau sans Maître with Pierre Boulez. She has presented for the New Music Gathering, CMS, NATS, and The Voice Foundation on practical vocal acoustics, instrumental paradigms applied to vocal technique, and implementing collaboration between voice and composition departments, as well as via more broadly-conceived interdisciplinary projects.

Peter Lea is an Assistant Teaching Professor of Music Theory at the University of Missouri. Peter holds a doctor of philosophy degree in music theory from the University of Western Ontario and master of music and bachelor of music degrees in piano performance from Brandon University. His research interests include music theory pedagogy, performance and analysis, transformational theory, and the music of George Crumb. He has presented papers on these topics at regional, national, and international conferences.

“Let Me Count the Ways”: Nostalgia and Repetition in Libby Larsen’s Sonnets f rom the Portuguese

Cara Stroud

In Libby Larsen's Sonnets from the Portuguese, the composer and her collaborator, Arleen Auger, sought to create a grouping of Barrett Browning's eponymous lyric poems that emphasized “growth in mature love” (Larsen 1993). As an aspect of “mature love,” memories and nostalgia figure prominently in the texts Larsen and Auger chose for the song cycle. In this paper, I will explore ways that textual repetitions in the sonnets are amplified by musical repetitions in the song cycle, forming a compelling exploration of love and nostalgia.

Repetition plays a crucial role in the emotional experience of nostalgia, since that bittersweet feeling emerges through the coexistence of a happy, past memory together with sadness and regret when re-living that memory in the present moment (Hatten and Robinson 2012, 87). Repeated elements also figure prominently into the creation and interpretation of poetry—for example, the typical rhyme scheme for Barrett Browning’s chosen form, the Petrarchan sonnet (abba abba cdcdcd), encodes the text with a certain amount of prescribed repetition.

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Barrett Browning’s well-known Sonnet 43 (“How do I love thee ? . . .”) repeats the phrase “I love thee” an astounding eight times. Larsen sets Sonnet 43 in the final movement of the song cycle, and the eight repeated “I love thee”s are presented with slight variations in pitch and rhythm that nuance the vast dimensions of the protagonist’s love. However, repetition in this song cycle goes further than the intensification of an emotional state.

In the third movement, the comparisons encouraged by musical repetitions produce an effect similar to the speaker’s nostalgic comparison. Self-quotations are presented in a way that adds a layer of nostalgia to the fourth movement of the song cycle.

Cara Stroud is an Assistant Professor of Music Theory at Michigan State University. Her research focuses on narrative strategies in music by Alfred Schnittke, Libby Larsen, and John Corigliano. She also studies recent Top 40 pop music and plays the cello. Cara has presented her research at the National Society for Music Theory, the Society for American Music, Music Theory Southeast, Texas Society for Music Theory, and GAMuT conferences. At MSU, she teaches courses in 20th- and 21st-century music theory and in musical narrative.

Jenna Krystine Buck is a third-year doctoral student at Michigan State University, under

the tutelage of Professor Jane Bunnell. She hails from the Chicagoland area. She began her music study at Hope College in Holland, MI, where she earned her Bachelor of Music in Vocal Performance, studying with Linda Dykstra. In the past few years Buck has sung the role of ‘Queen of the Night’ in MSU’s production of The Magic Flute and completed an MSU-affiliated production of Poulenc’s La voix humaine. She participated in the Martina Arroyo “Prelude to Performance” program in the summer of 2017.

A native of Taiwan, Ya-Ju Chuang is an active performer, appearing as a soloist, chamber

musician, and collaborative pianist. Ya-Ju has been awarded numerous prizes and scholarships in Taiwan and the United States. She won the Honors Competition at Michigan State University, and performed with MSU Symphony Orchestra at Wharton Center. As a collaborative pianist, Ya-Ju worked as a staff accompanist at Interlochen Arts Camp, and The Music Teachers National Association East Central Division competitions. Ya-Ju recently received a Doctor of Musical Arts degree in piano performance from Michigan State University, where she studied with Artist-in-Residence Panayis Lyras. Ya-Ju is currently working on her master’s degree in Piano Pedagogy.

Robert Morris’ Cold Mountain Songs Brian Alegant

Robert Morris’s Cold Mountain Songs (1993) is based on the poetry of Han-Shan, a ninth-

century Chinese poet, Taoist, and Buddhist hermit. A chapter in the composer’s A Whistling Blackbird explains how Morris describes Han-shan and his world in musical terms, arranging 14 poems into a narrative that traces “the story of a person who gives up ordinary life, becomes a hermit, and reaches enlightenment.” This presentation suggests a number of different listening strategies for the cycle. I first trace the large-scale form, showing how texture, register, density and harmonic rhythm ebb and flow throughout the fourteen songs and five piano interludes. I then examine aspects of the source row, exploring its intervallic properties, its super-saturated set classes, and a handful of signature or referential trichords, tetrachords, and hexachords. A close look at the realization of select passages suggests some of the ways in which the row is used to generate an extraordinary variety of compositional designs and sonic surfaces. The analyses pay particular attention to texture, register, harmony, and especially octave doubling, which plays a vital role in the

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slowly contracting and expanding sense of harmonic rhythm. My aim is to provide several ways into the work, for generalists and specialists alike.

Brian Alegant is Chair of the Music Theory Department at the Oberlin College Conservatory, where he has taught since 1996, and the CASE and Carnegie Foundation 2015 Professor of the Year. His research interests include pedagogy, twelve-tone music, and analysis and performance, with a particular interest in contemporary music. He has served as editor of Intégral and Music Theory Spectrum, authored The Twelve-tone Music of Luigi Dallapiccola and over two dozen essays in journals and books, and premiered and written about Robert Morris’s Scraps for solo piano.

Soprano Deborah Norin-Kuehn has performed under the batons of Peter Bay, David Hayes, Aaron Jay Kernis, Oliver Knussen, and has been featured throughout the U.S, Canada, England, France, Germany and Italy with Ensemble 21, Opera Company of Philadelphia, the Philadelphia Singers, pianists Jeffrey Jacob, Margaret Kampmeier, Marilyn Nonken and Thomas Rosenkranz, and Vox Electroacoustica. A student of the late Todd Duncan, Gershwin’s original Porgy, at the Curtis Institute of Music (Artist Diploma), Norin-Kuehn holds vocal performance degrees from the Eastman School of Music (DMA, MM). Currently on the voice faculty of Heidelberg University, she resides in Sylvania, Ohio, with her husband and their two children.

Guilt, Deliberation, Affirmation: Britten’s The Holy Sonnets o f John Donne as Catharsis

Gordon Sly

In the immediate aftermath of a series of performances he gave with Yehudi Menuhin in July, 1945 for survivors of recently liberated Bergen-Belsen, Britten selected nine of John Donne’s nineteen Holy Sonnets and arranged the poems so as to weave narrative threads through two levels of organization. In Sonnets 1-3 an opening declaration of guilt leads through a deliberation that focuses persistently on doubt as the cause of that guilt. This leads in turn to an admission that the absence of God in the speaker is the cause of his empty life. Sonnets 4-6 begin with the speaker admitting guilt over his assiduous inconstancy. This leads him to deliberation of the object of his erratic devotion—Christ’s sacrifice. Finally, he acknowledges that God offers His love, but in the end avows that God is insufficient. Sonnets 7-9 are occupied expressly with death. The apocalypse is upon us and humanity’s day of reckoning is at hand. The speaker claims the guilt of “sinnes that abound above” those of all others. The deliberation then draws inward, as the speaker, confronting his own death, entreats God to improve him before he is judged. Finally, “Death be not proud” affirms that eternal life conquers death. If we take a step back, a larger narrative comes into view, one that links the groupings themselves into an overarching architecture. The essential idea that emerges from the opening set of three sonnets is guilt caused by unrelenting doubt. This moves to the central deliberation—the essence of Christ. The closing group, finally, dwells on death, and affirms ultimately that Christ’s sacrifice secures humanity’s redemption. This architecture unfolds within the larger image of all of humanity—indeed, humanity’s soul—on trial, convened by the piano’s opening hammered double-octave gavel-strikes and Donne’s ferocious accusation of the soul, and concluded with the verdict of “Death be not proud.” My presentation will begin with an analysis of the sonnets that assembles this narrative structure, and then move to Britten’s settings to show how the design manifests in musical terms.

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Gordon Sly is Associate Professor of Music Theory at Michigan State University. His Keys to the Drama: Nine Perspectives on Sonata Forms (Ashgate, 2009) is an edited volume that presents nine studies of idiosyncratic works in sonata form. He also authored the “Sonata Form” article for Oxford Bibliographies Online, and has published articles and reviews on a number of topics, including the pedagogy of analysis. Recent work focuses on Britten: a book chapter on the Serenade for tenor, horn, and strings; current work on The Holy Sonnets of John Donne; and forthcoming studies on the Nocturnal and the 3rd Canticle.

E. Brysien Beer is in his final semester of study as a Vocal Performance major at Michigan

State University. As a tenor he has presented recitals in China, Italy and of course the United States. Brysien has a passion for teaching as well. He runs an inner city vocal arts program for disadvantaged students interested in pursuing music. Outside of vocal music Mr. Beer has taught for National Mathematics competition, Suzuki Violin Programs and held workshops with numerous youth orchestras. Currently Brysien studies with Mezzo-Soprano Jane Bunnell. He has also studied or been coached by Richard Fracker, John Wustman, Elden Little, Duane Davis, Scott Bosscher, and Alan Nathan.

Dr. Sheryl Iott is an active teacher, solo and collaborative performer, speaker and

adjudicator, and serves on the piano faculties of Interlochen Arts Camp and Grand Rapids Community College. She is a member of the Board of Examiners for the Royal Conservatory of Toronto, for whom she also serves as an online teacher certification facilitator. Much of her collaborative work—with trumpet, low brass, saxophone, and vocalists—involves contemporary music. She spent last spring at the University of Brasília, Brazil on a Fulbright Scholarship, teaching piano pedagogy and coaching collaborative piano/chamber music, and also performed concerts with Paula Van Goes, Ricardo Douarde Freire, and Anderson Alves. Her teachers included Ralph and Tina Votapek, Ian Hobson, and Joseph Evans. She has published in music education and piano pedagogy, is currently working on a book on music cognition and effective practice strategies, and maintains an active private piano studio in her home in Grand Rapids.

On the Evocation of Loss in John Ireland’s We’l l to the Woods no more Jon Wild

The 1927 song cycle We’ll to the Woods no more, by English composer John Ireland, sets the words of A. E. Housman from his Last Poems of 1922. The third and final work in the cycle is for piano alone, to be performed while the singer remains silent, though it bears a title and a prefatory quotation from an earlier poem by Housman. It is an unusual device to round out a pair of songs with a piece for solo piano, and I devote some attention to the issue of how the whole coheres as a cycle. This final number contains several musical references to the previous songs; through close reading of the score I demonstrate the composer’s approach to musical transformation. In We’ll to the Woods no more Ireland’s elusive, veiled approach to tonality and his remarkable harmonic palette—in places rich and sonorous, and in others stark and desolate—reach arguably their high point among his song output. Interpretation of the cycle’s programme must begin with the composer’s deep feelings for the work’s dedicatee, Arthur Miller, a younger man who had had a close friendship with Ireland for a number of years until a crisis of some sort precipitated Miller’s marriage in 1927, followed by Ireland’s own unhappy and short-lived marriage that same year. The cycle projects an almost overwhelming nostalgia in its first two songs, wrought with difficulty and grief. I read the singer’s silence in the final number as a statement of the protagonist’s inability or unwillingness to carry on.

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The work is harmonically thorny, yet through my analysis I am able to demonstrate its large-scale consistency and to identify some of Ireland’s idiosyncratic takes on tonality. Through an intensely personal web of musical correspondences, Ireland expresses here the programme of loss in a cryptic, uniquely moving way.

Jon Wild is Associate Professor at McGill University in Montreal, Canada, where he teaches Music Theory, and Composition. Current research includes analysis of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century repertoires, focusing both on the chromaticism of late tonality and on early atonal works; speculative compositional theory (often incorporating a mathematical and/or computational approach) and transformational theory. Jon undertook his doctoral work at Harvard under the supervision of David Lewin. His editorial board appointments past and present include the Journal of Music Theory; Music Theory Spectrum; and the Journal of Mathematics and Computation in Music.

Tyler Martin is a Lyric Baritone who has performed in many shows, portraying Elviro in Handel’s Xerxes, Antonio in Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro, and Mr. Erlanson in Stephen Sondheim’s A Little Night Music. His passion for comedic opera is matched by his love for theater. Tyler has done many outreach performances with opera companies, such as Opera Grand Rapids, and cabaret shows with Box 5 Productions. Tyler has also performed internationally both in Italy and in China, where he performed with MSU Opera theater at the Peking National Opera House. Tyler attended Michigan State University for his bachelors in vocal performance and is currently working on his master’s, also at MSU.

Pianist Neill Campbell is a graduate of Michigan State University (MM '14, BM '11), and was most recently a staff pianist/coach at the Janiec Opera Company at Brevard Music Center, where he worked on productions of Don Pasquale and Street Scene. For the past two years, Neill was a Resident Artist at Shreveport Opera, and the pianist for the Shreveport Opera Xpress program. At Shreveport, he served as chorus master and rehearsal pianist for Shreveport Opera's mainstage productions, as well as pit pianist and recitative harpsichordist. Neill has performed across the United States, and internationally in Italy and in Havana, Cuba, with Michigan State University.

Exploring the Cyclic Nature of Georgy Sviridov’s Pushkin Romances Lisa Feurzeig

In 1935, nineteen-year-old Georgy Sviridov (1915-98) set six poems by Pushkin to music in

the genre of the romans. These early songs reveal a composer who has developed a command of melody, harmony, and structure, creates an appropriate balance between voice and piano, and captures Pushkin’s dark moods. What holds them together as a set, and should they be considered a cycle?

Sviridov had studied composition for a few years when he composed the Pushkin romances, and it is reasonable to assume that he had encountered various song cycles. I will argue from textual and musical evidence that the Six Romances may be modeled after works like Schumann’s early cycles setting poems of Eichendorff and Heine. As in those cycles, the poetry comes from various places in the poet’s work, so any narrative is created by the composer. Without a cohesive story, linkage is conveyed by mood, tone, connections between poems, and musical similarities.

The poems are autobiographical, but they emphasize emotional states rather than specific events and do not proceed chronologically. Shared textual themes include fall and winter, stormy weather, travel, and drinking to overcome sorrow. Songs 2 and 6 describe the poet traveling to meet

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a girlfriend, while songs 3 and 4 concern his appreciation and love for an older woman, identified in song 3 as his former nanny.

All the songs use relatively simple musical forms with repeated sections. After the first five songs, whose keys move up and down by minor thirds, the final song introduces a new key along with the major mode. This deviation from the tonalities of the earlier songs matches the poem’s lighter ambience, bringing the cycle to a more optimistic close.

Dr. Lisa Feurzeig is Professor of Music at Grand Valley State University. Her research centers on text-music relations in vocal music, especially German art song, Viennese popular theater and operetta, and German-American music. Her book, Schubert’s Lieder and the Philosophy of Early German Romanticism, was published in 2014. During the past fall and winter, she was in Vienna as a Fulbright-IFK Senior Fellow in Cultural Studies. Her project was an investigation of performance styles and political expression in present-day Central European operetta performance.

Soprano, Opera Director and Singing Health Specialist, Dr. Rachael Gates has sung in Germany, Russia, Italy and throughout the United States. She has taught at Northwestern University, The Hartt School of Music, Yale University, Michigan State University, and is currently Visiting Assistant Professor of Voice and Pedagogy at Grand Valley State University. She is the voice specialist for the College Music Society Committee on Musicians' Health and is published in the NATS Journal of Singing. Her book, The Owner’s Manual to the Voice (Oxford) is available at The Metropolitan Opera Shop.

Robert Cornwell is an accomplished solo and collaborative pianist with degrees in

performance from Oberlin College and the University of Michigan. He has a private studio in Okemos, MI.

“As if with lightning bolts”: The Ombra and Tempesta in Schoenberg’s Das Buch der hängenden Gärten

Jessica Narum

Arnold Schoenberg’s 1908-09 song cycle Das Buch der hängenden Gärten sets fifteen texts by the poet Stefan George. These songs, in conjunction with Schoenberg’s Second String Quartet and the Opus 11 Piano Pieces, are Schoenberg’s first compositions that abandon a tonal center. As such, these songs may appear to resist the type of harmonic or textual analysis available to performers of song cycles by Schoenberg’s predecessors. Most previous analyses of this cycle rely on pitch-class set-class theory to highlight structural relationships within and between songs. This structural approach, however, may overlook the expressive aspects of Schoenberg’s song cycle.

In this paper, I trace how Schoenberg’s employs elements of two primary topics, the ombra and the tempesta, to shape our understanding of Stefan George’s texts. As discussed by Clive McClelland, both topics originate in seventeenth-century opera and persist into the twentieth. The ombra is marked by low registers, slow or restrained rhythmic features, sudden harmonic changes, and unexpected chromaticism; it often signifies awe or dread. The tempesta, on the other hand, features a higher level of activity, including scalar passages or repeated accompanimental patterns; this may be used to signify agitation, fear, or emotional distress. Schoenberg employs textures and figures throughout Das Buch der hängenden Gärten that evoke both of these topics, influencing how listeners hear and interpret these songs. As I will demonstrate, topical analysis has the ability to uncover expressive interconnections within and between songs; in addition, by focusing on the

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ombra and the tempesta, this paper identifies how two older topics transform and persist into the twentieth century.

Jessica Narum is an Assistant Professor of Music Theory at the Baldwin Wallace University Conservatory of Music, where she teaches harmony, aural skills, and post-tonal analysis. She holds a Ph.D. in Music Theory from the University of Minnesota. Her research primarily concerns musical meaning after 1900; her dissertation focused on the analysis of musical topics in the work of Arnold Schoenberg. Her most recent research project concerns the use of minimalist music in late-twentieth-century television commercials for communications technology. Dr. Narum’s other research interests include popular music, performance and analysis, and music theory pedagogy.

Tracy R. Grady, M.M., is a member of the voice faculty at the Baldwin Wallace University Conservatory of Music and of the faculty of the BW Department of Theatre and Dance. She has performed with many Cleveland-area groups such as the Cleveland Pops Orchestra, the former Cleveland Opera, and the Euclid Symphony. Grady frequently performs on the BW campus in solo faculty performances as well as collaborative opportunities with colleagues and students. She is the co-founder of the Cleveland Transgender Choir, and is leading local efforts to encourage trans and non-binary persons to make music.

Pianist Sungeun Kim has given numerous concerts in the U.S., Canada, Russia, Spain, Korea, and Italy. A first-prize winner of the Virginia Waring International Piano Competition, she has appeared with the Russian Federation Orchestra in Bolshoi Hall at the Moscow Conservatory, the Banff Festival Orchestra, the International Chamber Ensemble of Rome, and the Gijon Symphony Orchestra. Sungeun Kim is Associate Professor of Piano at Baldwin Wallace University Conservatory of Music. She received a BM degree from Yon-Sei University with Kyung Sook Lee, and MM and DMA degrees from the Peabody Conservatory of the Johns Hopkins University with Julian Martin.

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