Poetry and Music: A Conversation With Poet Elisabeth T. Eliassen

What is so wonderful about for me about my poetic “thought music” is that while it can have specific meaning for me, it doesn’t have to have a specific meaning for anyone else.

— poet Elisabeth T. Eliassen

My new choral work Waiting… is built around a hand-picked group of poems by Bay Area poet Elisabeth T. Eliassen, who is not only singing in the upcoming premiere, but has been very supportive and accessible during my process of composing the piece.

Owing to the unique aspects of this particular collaboration, we thought it would be interesting and edifying, to say nothing of fun, to share a bit of our ongoing email discussion about the creative process as it relates to music and poetry.

You can read the piece here, on Elisabeth’s blog Songs of a Soul Journey, where a great deal more of her work can also be read.

The Sanford Dole Ensemble will give the premiere performance Waiting…, for chorus, string quartet and piano, at the San Francisco Conservatory on February 4th at 8:00pm.  Tickets will be available at the door or directly from the Sanford Dole Ensemble for $30.

Update: (1/31/12) Elisabeth has posted an additional installment of our conversation.  You can read that here.

Setting Chinese Poetry in Translation

While I wait for some red tape to clear around one project, I’ve decided to go ahead with another one (and see how disciplined I can be about finishing it quickly). Now is the time for the song cycle I’ve had in the pipeline for a while now.

Among the texts used in my 1996 chorus/orchestra piece Cycle of Friends are translations by Innes Herdan of two Chinese poems from the Tang era. Despite their being translations, they are probably the most satisfying poems I’ve ever worked with. So, I’ve decided to return to her book 300 T’ang Poems to see what grabs me for a new song cycle.

Now, setting poetry in translation raises some interesting questions to begin with. How familiar do you have to be with the original language? How much do you need to know about the given language’s literary tradition? Is it necessary to “get” each and every allusion in the poem? Etcetera.

Each composer will have his or her own set of answers for those questions, but should not begin composing without asking them. I think it is helpful to find out what one can about the traditions and conventions that the poem might be based on. However, in the end, I’m setting a poem in English, and it’s the English rhythm and the choice of English words that matters. If it’s a faithful translation, then the overall effect desired by the original poet will still inform the composition.

I enjoy Mrs. Herdan’s translations, because she is a wonderful poet in her own right, and adds that gift to her understanding of the original Chinese. Although I will find out what I can about the significance of various images in the poems, which will of course inform the resulting music, I’m also likely to respond to them as original poetry, and interpret them in my own way.

The issue of translating Chinese poetry is particularly delicate. The written language consists of characters representing whole words or ideas, as opposed to letters representing phonemes or syllables. Also, it is a very terse, elliptical language with no articles, genders, cases, tenses or other fussy grammatical concerns, which leaves the translator a lot of latitude to be creative.

Example
Here’s a literal translation of four five-character lines from a poem by Du Fu:

Fragrant mist cloud dressed hair wet
Clear brightness jade arm cold
What time lean on empty curtain
Pair shine tears trace dry

Here’s how Innes Herdan translated those lines:

In the sweet mists her cloud-like hair is damp;
In the clear shining her jade-white arms are cold.
When shall we two lean beside the filmy curtain
With moonlight on us both and the tear-stains dry?

Many of these Tang-era poems take rigid forms involving either five characters or seven characters per line. I imagine they’re quite musical to listen to in the original language. (In fact, the Chinese for “recite”, as in poetry, is literally “chant”.) It would be a tall order to even approximate that in translation, and I doubt anyone has done it successfully. Whether the translation will also “sing” just depends on the translator.

Innes Herdan keeps her lines short with “grammar words” at a minimum. The stresses in the English line correspond to the characters in the Chinese line. For example, the character “house” in the Chinese might become “in my house” in English, with emphasis on the word “house”. But the real magic is in the actual choice of words, and the occasional liberties that are taken. My favorite example in the lines quoted above is Mrs. Herdan’s use of the word “filmy”, of which there is no apparent sign in the original Chinese.

As for my piece, I’ve zeroed in on several poems by Du Fu (712�770), which I’ve organized in rather an interesting way. More about that will be posted here in the future.

An Old Favorite: Cycle of Friends Turns 10

Today was the 10th anniversary of the premiere of my first commissioned work.

Cycle of Friends, for soprano, chorus and chamber orchestra, was premiered on May 3rd, 1996 by the Music Group of Philadelphia. Artistic Director Sean Deibler had been one of my undergraduate teachers, and has been a mentor and all-around guru ever since. I was very lucky to be one of three composers he chose for a three-year commissioning binge he was on at the time, thanks to a special grant. The commission came through as I was finishing my master’s degree at the S.F. Conservatory. (I was studying with Conrad Susa when I wrote this piece; it doesn’t get better than that for choral music.)

This was a dream come true at the time. I had sung in Sean’s choruses at the University of the Arts as well as his Choral Arts Society of Philadelphia, which was then the Philadelphia Orchestra’s chorus of choice. So, thanks to Sean, I was intimately familiar choral music from a cappella gems like the Ravel Trois Chansons, Hindemith’s Six Chansons and Barber’s Reincarnations to massive symphonic masterworks including The Damnation of Faust and John Adams’ Harmonium. (I should post a complete list, just for fun someday. It’s pretty amazing.) So, I was chomping at the bit to write a big choral piece myself.

Poetry for Composers

My post about Doctor Atomic has got me thinking about this whole business of effectively setting poetry to music. This is something John Adams has always been exceptionally good at, even if I don’t agree with his approach to writing for the stage. But it’s certainly not a given that any good composer would be able to do this well.

Most of my career has focused on writing for the voice, whether it was for art songs, choral pieces or theatrical works, and so being able to analyze a text is something I’ve had to learn (and am still learning). I recently adjudicated a composition competition where many of the submissions were vocal pieces, and it was a big surprise how few of those composers seemed to know, or even care, much about how to handle a text.

Personally, I’ve always been drawn to theater, and that type of text setting comes to me fairly naturally. Of course, it helps that in that type of project, one normally has the ability to help shape the text according to the requirements of musical setting (or write it oneself, which I’ve been doing lately). But in the case of setting poetry, as is usually done with art songs and choral pieces, it’s been more of a struggle.

For starters, the process of choosing texts can be daunting. I’ve only once been given a specific poem to set (e.e. cummings’ “I think you God for most this Amazing”), and it was just pure dumb luck that it happened to be appropriate for musical setting. I’m very picky. For me, in order for a poem to be “settable”, it needs to have very short lines and very few ideas packed into a stanza, which disqualifies most poems. I think a lot of composers fail to recognize that most poetry stands on its own without music, and shouldn’t be monkeyed with. Poetry should be chosen that leaves space for the composer to enhance it through music — perhaps to draw out a hidden meaning. There needs to be room for interpretation.

Here’s an example of a wonderful poem by Emily Dickinson that’s short enough to allow a composer to take his or her time coloring each line. I used this poem in my chorus/orchestra piece Cycle of Friends, and used repetition to stretch the poem into a musical form (think Kyrie Eleison in a Mass).

Listen here:

Are Friends Delight or Pain?
Could Bounty but remain
Riches were good –
But if they only stay
Ampler to fly away
Riches are sad.

For composers wishing to improve their text analysis skills, a great resource was just published a few months ago. In Break, Blow, Burn Camille Paglia walks you through her own reading of 43 poems from various periods. (I’m still working my way through it.) The point isn’t whether you agree with her readings. If, like me, you haven’t had extensive training in this area, reading her explanations gives you a feel for what to look for when choosing and setting poetry. Unless you’re an English major, you probably need this book, or something like it.

Sidebar

I can’t help mentioning that Dr. Paglia was one of my teachers at the University of the Arts before her first book Sexual Personae made her a celebrity. All I can say is, yeah, she’s really like that.

The Grackle and other Poems

My friend Tom Laughlin (now “Will” for some reason) wrote this incredibly funny poem years ago. It’s a send-up of Edgar Allen Poe’s The Raven, full of dizzying Sondheim-like internal rhymes. (Sibyl/Shibboleth, anyone?) I’d post the whole poem here, but my content column is too narrow to do it properly. So, take a look at the version on Tom’s web site, (which is primarily dedicated to his obsession with bad horror movies).

While you’re there, take a look at his Rhymes and Dances, a series of very short, very funny poems. (Follow the “Things That Rhyme” link on the home page). About 15 years ago, I did a choral setting of one of them, Ducks in the Garden.

By the way, for all these years, I thought that a grackle was something Tom made up. Turns out it’s an actual, real type of bird. Eh, what do you want from a city kid.