A Distraction

From Lois:

Here is a link to a recording of Aaron Copland's songs on texts by Emily Dickinson:

https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/#search/lshapiro%40wellesley.edu/FMfcgxwHMjjnkdBCGTgjhCTLpkPQVQzg?projector=1

and here are some wonderful notes written for a performance of the songs by a Wellesley alum, Sarah Pelletier! Thanks, Lois--

Program Notes on:

Twelve Poems of Emily Dickinson (1949-50) by Aaron Copland

“My Business is to SING”

Emily Dickinson

“Her compositions were unlike anything ever heard, and always produced quite a sensation…. Her imagination sparkled-- and she gave it free rein.”

Austin Dickinson, Emily’s brother

“While looking through an anthology,” Copland wrote,” I came upon a poem by Emily Dickinson that appealed to me…There was something about her personality and use of language that was fresh, precise, utterly unique and very American.”

“I fell in love with one poem ‘The Chariot.’…After I set that poem, I continued reading Emily Dickinson. The more I read, the more her vulnerability and loneliness touched me……. I found another poem, then one more, and yet another. They accumulated gradually.” For Copland, a composer whose career was marked by commission-generated works, the writing of this song cycle was truly a labor of love. He wrote it without a commission, simply because he found himself irresistibly drawn to Emily’s poetry. Indeed, these songs marked Copland’s first works for solo voice and piano in more than twenty years!

     As outwardly different as these artists were---Copland, the cosmopolitan New York Jewish male, a world traveler celebrated for grandiose musical tableaux evoking both jazz-permeated urban landscapes as well as the vast, boundless expanses of rural America; Dickinson, the reclusive woman of parochial-Christian stock, content to sacrifice life in the outside more “public” world to her Muse of the oft-shattering miniature—this remarkable song cycle confirms an essential artistic kinship between the two. Their artistic kinship may be described as the pairing of profound, potentially boundless subject matter with a deliberately plain-spoken tone. In musical terms, the use of simple musical materials such as widely spaced, open sonorities—often, elemental fourths and fifths-- with a great deal of rhythmic plasticity and a plenitude of space around the notes themselves, allowing them to resound fully and create a quality of timelessness.

    Copland considered this group of songs to be a “cycle”, and indeed the most obvious cyclic element is the repetition of material from the 7th song in the final song, (There are other more subliminal points of reference and repetition, such as particular motivic patterns of 4ths and 3rds, but, given the remarkable imaginative range in the music, these hidden correspondences remain as such—perhaps just lending a quality of unconscious coherence.) Other binding forces are the poetic themes of nature, love/loss, religious faith/doubt, death and eternity.

      As a composer, Copland was an iconoclast in some circles, given that he embraced such a wide range of musical styles over his extended career and therefore, his work did not fit neatly into a single category. Critics labeled his music as either “popular”—the Americana-inspired-- or “serious” –the thorny, dissonant pieces. He himself preferred to speak in terms of “accessible” or “problematic”. Perhaps what makes the Dickinson song cycle his greatest work is its transcendence of any particular category---the synergy of text and music is so perfect, with the words seeming to have inspired Copland to give his imagination full rein. No easy feat to write such a work, in which the composer must meet the needs of not only the words—through “word painting”, but must also tend to the form of each poem and the form of the entire set as an integral unity. Moreover, one must strive to create music that has its own distinct profile and character, and not just “shadow” the poems in any subservient way. The Emily Dickinson songs evince Copland’s mastery to successfully meet all of the compositional challenges this work set forth for him.

A few highlights:

In the first song, “Nature, the gentlest mother”, we find a tonal pastorale, highlighting the nurturing quality of Nature through the elegiac character, with musical birdcalls setting the stage. Juxtaposed with this portrayal of nature’s benevolence is the 2nd song, which describes nature as a force of chaos, danger, and overwhelming power, in the face of which we feel essentially vulnerable. Copland resorts to a palette of thorny dissonance to make the poetic point on a visceral level, bringing on a swirl of triple meter, in an otherwise duple setting, for the description of flood waters; church bells sound in vertiginous billows of piano chords to reference Emily’s description of the scene. “Why do they shut me out of heaven?” gives us a kind of recitative setting of Emily’s query: is it really okay to be a vibrant, outspoken woman?

   In this song, and throughout the cycle, Copland captures her inner conflict between being who she is—a woman in her time and place searching for her own authentic answers, vacillating painfully between faith and doubt—and facing the essential loneliness of her journey.  At the end in “The Chariot”,  as she contemplates her own death,  both poem and music create a graceful,  epiphanic experience of a peaceful ride in a carriage, driven by Death, in which she amicably shares the ride with Immortality. The combination of yearning for more of life’s bounty, along with a sense of acceptance of the inevitable is potently and tenderly realized in this moving summation of one of the greatest works for voice and piano written in the 20th century.

   The vibrancy of the Copland/Dickinson collaboration reminds us that, in the words of Ralph Waldo Emerson (The Poet, 1844):

 “The sign and credentials of the poet are, that he announces that which no man foretold…. a thought so passionate and alive that, like the spirit of a plant or an animal, it has an architecture of its own, and adorns nature with a new thing. The poet has a new thought; he will tell us how it was with him, and all men will be the richer in his fortune.”

notes by Lois Shapiro