There's nothing more crestfalling than being asked what you accomplished in your youth, as if the standard is set by the prodigal and lucky. Classical music has dozens of wunderkinder for every instrument and medium, including the Fab Four of Mozart, Prokofiev, Mendelssohn and Korngold (which I just made up). Vivian Fine (1913-2000; hey, it's her centennial!) has probably never been counted among these luminaries for this or any other position, but considering her first serious composition was written at 16 and displays a unique modernistic language right out of the gate, we'll have to add her name to the list of enfants irrepressible. Fine had a long and distinguished career, penning more than 140 compositions and teaching at Bennington College for 23 years. To the benefit of people like me her estate has posted the bulk of her pieces on IMSLP under a Creative Commons license, such a generous act that I may have to make an "On the Vivian Fine collection at IMSLP" article in the future. For now, let's look at one of her first published works, which made waves at its premiere...when she was 20. Dammit.
Premiered at a League of Composers concert in 1933, the 4 Songs for voice and string quartet are astonishing feats, intense and eerie settings of what are largely unassuming, yet elusive, love poems. Sitting squarely in her first period, atonal counterpoint (much like her ultra-modernist colleagues such as Ruth Crawford and Carl Ruggles), each song illuminates the text with unique instrumental pairings, deft vocal writing and haunting colors. The voice setting is so good that one critic said, "Only Virgil Thomson’s setting of the English language rivals it among 20th century composers. It is natural, perfectly speech-like, yet measured and expressive." The songs are split in half by source: the first two are 16th-century British settings, the latter two from James Joyce's Pomes Penyeach. I'd say that there are too many Joyce settings among 20th century art songs, but Fine's contributions to the rep suggest there aren't enough. My favorite of the four songs is the third, "She Weeps Over Rahoon", which employs icy, pianissimo harmonics to scrape along the retinas, very fitting of a poem that darkly glowing. However, the only leaf among them is the first, "The Lover in Winter Plaineth for the Spring."
(Click for larger view)
Based upon an anonymous Elizabethan text -
O Western wind, when wilt thou blow
That the small rain down can rain?
Christ, that my love were in my arms
And I in my bed again!
- Fine leaves the voice alone with a viola, working through a staid and desolate 12-tone row that switches gears at the pp. The voice follows suit in a strikingly complex, off-centered rhythm. As the poem's narrator is alone in damp anticipation, the music arcs and doesn't arc, remaining an elliptical procession to the end. The atonal writing strikes a delicate balance between expressive and disarming, giving enough to follow but not necessarily understand. It's also a rare piece that benefits from a dry performance area, as the recording included on IMSLP proves. For some reason the dull room noise makes the heaving loneliness of the music ring that much more unnervingly. I'd try to come up with an ideal listening environment, but I can't do much better than Joyce's Rahoonian environment - "moongrey nettles, the black mould and muttering rain." Check out all the songs, score and recording, here, but wait for a grey moonrise. It'll be better that way.
~PNK
No comments:
Post a Comment