This is the opening to Lounge Pianist for vocalizing pianist.
[audio:https://www.markgustavson.com/blog/audio/Opening to Lounge Pianist.mp3|titles=Opening to Lounge Pianist]
Contact me if you would like to receive a recording of the whole piece or the sheet music.
I met Johs many years ago when he lived in New York and was working for Irving Penn. We became friends at International House, New York where we both lived for two years while I was studying composition at Columbia University.
Bøe is a serious artist and his seriousness is confirmed by the direct addressing of color and form in the photographs in the Hildring series. These photographs focus on light, both in form and color, in other words, light and lightness. The blurring of the edges by defocusing and softening or completely removing outlines accomplishes this dual light and lightness. As a result the images sometimes become translucent and meld with the surroundings like drifting gases. One can feel the balancing of an object as it appears lighter than one would except it to be.
The series includes many photographs but I will address three of them. To get an idea of scale the photographer stands in front of one of his prints. The show opened in November of 2009 at Galleri Trafo in Asker, a suburb of Oslo.
This photograph could be described as “stark” and yet because of the
lightness of the objects a contradiction is at play. In fact, most of the images in these photographs take what could have been a heavy tone or presented with gravity but instead lightness takes the place of gravity letting light overcome dark. But do not be mistaken, “light” can be serious, deep and full of metaphor. This is not cheap light, diet light. This is lungs full of fresh air light, mind fully awake light—metaphorical light.
Another luminous photograph is of a man in an interior in front of light filled windows. The light is almost dissolving the walls and objects in the room—even the man’s head. Is the sun’s light vaporizing?Is the photograph a moment of suspended vaporization?
In another photograph the light is dissolving the image. The body is verging on weightlessness. And the body’s gait aides in the illusion of lightness. But before it floats away it more likely will dissipate like a cloud of steam.
A very old friend of mine, the Norwegian photographer Johs Bøe, has a web site dedicated to his recent series of photographs entitled Hildring. Hildring means “mirage” or “optical illusion” in Norwegian. I will have more to say about these photos in another post. Please visit his website, www.johsboe.com.
A Dutch newspaper reviewed a song cycle of mine that took place in Amsterdam. The critic added that “…the music neither added nor subtracted from the poems.” When I first read this I was taken aback, thinking it was a negative remark. Now I see that his comment is a positive remark. My aim in the work was to realize the texts, not to set them or enrich them or glorify them or heighten them but to find a sound world that would let the texts be themselves. To be “in tune” with the qualities that make the poems…resonate. A contrary approach to mine would be to heighten the meaning or question the meaning or fool with the meaning or interfere with the rhythm of the words or to parody the text. I have always approached text by not interfering with it. If I succeeded or failed at finding the right state for the text, it was a risk worth taking.
In my Fisherman Songs I am taking an even greater risk. One song uses John Donne’s poem “The Baite.” Perhaps as a kindred spirit I take Donne’s quoting of Marlowe’s “Passionate Shepherd to His Love” as the opening of his poem a step further. Donne begins his poem by quoting the first couple of lines from Marlowe’s poem but then leaves it to explore his own perception of love that is neither bucolic nor romantic but realistic, that all is not fair in relations of the heart. I begin the song with an allusion to Gershwin’s aria from Porgy and Bess, “A Woman is a Sometime Thing.” The aria begins with a warning from Porgy about not trusting woman. Before the end of the first stanza the music leaves behind any hint of Gershwin, similar to Donne abandoning Marlow, and into a oneness with the text.
A Woman is a Sometime Thing by George Gershwin:
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ldPuFA0PG8k&w=500]
The first 15 measures of my song (cello sound substitutes the singer) The Baite:
[audio:https://www.markgustavson.com/blog/audio/The%20Baite.mp3|titles=The Baite (excerpt)]
I am using W.B. Yeats’ poem “The Fisherman” as part of my song cycle The Fisherman Songs:
Although I can see him still,
The freckled man who goes
To a grey place on a hill
In grey Connemara clothes
At dawn to cast his flies,
It’s long since I began
To call up to the eyes
This wise and simple man.
All day I’d looked in the face
What I had hoped ’twould be
To write for my own race
And the reality;
The living men that I hate,
The dead man that I loved,
The craven man in his seat,
The insolent unreproved,
And no knave brought to book
Who has won a drunken cheer,
The witty man and his joke
Aimed at the commonest ear,
The clever man who cries
The catch-cries of the clown,
The beating down of the wise
And great Art beaten down.Maybe a twelvemonth since
Suddenly I began,
In scorn of this audience,
Imagining a man
And his sun-freckled face,
And grey Connemara cloth,
Climbing up to a place
Where stone is dark under froth,
And the down turn of his wrist
When the flies drop in the stream:
A man who does not exist,
A man who is but a dream;
And cried, ‘Before I am old
I shall have written him one
Poem maybe as cold
And passionate as the dawn.’
It is a wonderful poem that uses the Irish fly fisherman as a symbol of integrity and as Yeats ideal audience. As with the other poems, I have found it useful if I have an image. Here is a beautiful salmon fly that goes back to the 19th century with the name Connemara Black.
I have found a few photos of rivers running through Connemara County with steep hills. This images has someone fly fishing a river in Connemara.
I have mic’d my clarinet to go to my Mac where the signal is processed by a Max/MSP program and then output to my Behringer amp. The final sound can resemble a clarinet or not at all. But how I go about improvising changes based on the sound I hear from the speaker. I react quite differently to how I play the clarinet when I don’t hear clarinet but something else with a different attack, timbre etc. It is quite remarkable. If I could get the resulting sound to change every 10 seconds, for example, I would play differently for each change. I am playing a clarinet but I’m not hearing a clarinet and my instincts go with what I hear not what my fingers say.
The most recent addition to my ongoing song cycle Fisherman Songs is The Fishing Rod. This song has three points of conscience influences. The following 6th-century Chinese poem by Shen Yuëh provides the text:
Not only does my “cassia boat” drift “easily and free,”
But verdant banks are also winding in and out.
My light line stirs the tender water plants;
The muffled oars arouse a solitary duck.
I tap the gunwales, heedless that the sun is setting;
Till my dying day I’ll make this my delight.
I was very excited when I stumbled upon this poem as I spent hours reading translated poetry by Shen in the low greenish lit stacks of Stony Brook University. I was in fact looking for another poem by the same author but this poem is perfect. I was looking to compose a short song (3:00) whose subject was the beauty one finds while fishing.
Coincidently, just after I found this poem I visited the Metropolitan Museum of Art and saw this Chinese painting by Wu Zhen painted some 750 years later titled The Fisherman.
I meditated on this painting and poem as a tandem and a third source of inspiration came to me, “The Fisherman’s Song” from Stravinsky’s Opera Le Rossignol:
[embedyt] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nn9ltp8cB_0[/embedyt]
What Stravinsky’s song and mine have in common in addition to a fairly static presentation are the first three intervals (or four notes) of the melody: m3 – m2 – m3. Originally, I was using a motive from an older chamber piece of mine, Plexus, and cycling the notes of this four-note motive (C#-E-D#-F#) by reordering them and similar to the opening of the Stravinsky melody. But then I chose to alter my version somewhat to become more of a variation of the Stravinsky including using part of the tail of his melody. What differs is how the melodic lines relate to the harmony. Listen to baritone Charles Coleman accompanied by Francisco Miranda read The Fishing Rod.
Here is the score for the entire song:
Rendezvous with the in-laws at a mall so they could take my daughter for the day. While there I thought about going to Barnes and Noble to see what books by Krishnamurti they carried. I changed gears and instead went to Staples to pick up two much needed printer cartridges. The next morning my wife presents me a copy of The First and Last Freedom by Krishnamurti for Father’s Day.
What a perfectly wonderful motive. This is the Black-capped Chickadee’s call and since April these tiny birds have been going strong outside my window. Of course I’m leaving out some important information that would make it quite difficult for us to emulate this brief sound.
I always thought the loneliness this song evokes was the result of the wide major second, in this case, a sharpish B to an A. But further investigation reveals that the call actually begins on a slightly flat C that quickly (instantly!) slides to a sharpish B then to an A. But because the C is so brief it doesn’t influence the perceived wide major second. But isn’t it those little details—some may call them quirks—that gives a song its memorable character?
