The music of David Van Vactor (1906-1994) could best be described as charmingly backward. His stubbornness to adapt to a changing musical landscape has ensured a niche audience rather than a broad one - music academia has largely ignored his output while the public has been left uninformed via a lack of blow-the-doors-off opuses. This isn't to say there's no quality to be found, but rather that he fell in line with Middle-American (born in Indiana, flourished in Tennessee) composers of his ilk and held desperately to Neo-Romanticism (such as Herbert Elwell). American composers of the time didn't have as much pressure to get with the Moderns as their European counterparts, and publishers successfully pushed against modern trends well into the '40's before finally cracking.
Vactor sits at an interesting state of compromise between the Ultra-Moderns and the Old Guard, and was arguably the most conservative composer to be featured in Henry Cowell's New Music Edition, a seminal modernist journal that needs no introduction here. His issue is dedicated to songs he wrote in the '30's, all of which were re-engraved for his free-to-download catalog at Roger Rhodes Music, which is where I found them. And nestled among the freebies were three leaves, ripe for plucking.
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Each of them is a setting of rimas by Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer, one of the most important figures in Spanish literature and, for our purposes, a very talented poet. The rimas (rhymes) are very brief and often heartbreaking, and the three Vactor chose all concern the bittersweet realities of love. Vactor's language is here at its most impressionistic, setting each rima as if trying to balance a needle on rippling water. Rima XXI is the most fragile of the three, requiring deft pedaling and an even tone in order to not break the surface. There's no particular order to the songs, so I've ordered them to follow the numbering of the poems. And if I've mispronounced any of the Spanish I'll apologize in advance.
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Rima XXIII sidesteps any notions of bright-eyed, youthful love in favor of warmth and world-weariness, its harmonic language drenched in absinthe. The prospect of a kiss brings the singer to deep sighing, and the low register of the piano is exploited to a vaguely ominous effect. The vocal line ends on a minor seventh in relation to the bass, a strikingly unresolved note at the bottom of the singer's range (for a high voice like mine, anyways).
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Rima XXXVIII is the most overtly oceanic, with rich mid-range ripples planing in opposite directions. While the tone of the music is the most uplifted the poem is as melancholic as they get. After the listener is lulled into a sense of barcarollian calm, Vactor throws in a loop: the final question to the poem's subject cracks the heart in a thousand pieces, as if Bécquer conceived it staring across the expanse of the Mediterranean at twilight. Each of the Rimas is touching in their own right but XXXVIII has the greatest moment, and Vactor's take is priceless. If you've got a hankering for more of his work the door's wide open, but if not these small sapphires can shine quite brightly on their own - and perhaps they're more poignant if it's kept that way.
~PNK
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