Ned Rorem needs little introduction here, often hailed as America's greatest art song writer and deservedly so (after Ives, of course). Walt Whitman also needs little introduction, and when you name your blog after leaves it's only a matter of time before you write about Leaves of Grass. Arguably the most famous collection of poetry by an American, plenty of its poems have been set as art songs and Rorem's contributions to that oeuvre make up a Thanksgiving-sized portion. As both men were gay pacifists this isn't surprising, and Rorem's songwriting is deft enough to match Whitman's highly personal, loose verse, even when the resulting song is a mere page. I sense excellence afoot.
Rorem was musically raised in post-WWII Paris, where urbanity and elegance were king, and To You meets both those criteria with a wry smile. The poem is the slightest of the slight, illuminating a moment of humanity that might as well not even exist for how ignored it is. The looping piano texture, elongated via a three-note cell underneath a four-noter, peddles along in the spirit of a brisk walk or casual bike ride, forcing the social contact to be fleeting. Oddly enough, the song's resolution is almost too tonal, a Neo-Classical ironicalism in keeping with the poem's tone. And wouldn't you know it, Rorem wrote it so fast he wrote down the time of day it was completed, as if he saw a cute boy pass by while sitting in a café in Hyères and couldn't bear to let him get away without a song.
A much darker Whitman is heard in Look Down, Fair Moon, taken from his Civil War sequence Drum-Taps. Rorem blew everybody out of the water in 1970 with his devastating Drum-Taps-sourced cycle War Scenes, but this song predates it by more than a decade and is composed in a noticeably different style (his original style). Much like To You the poem captures a fleeting emotion, but it's the kind of emotion that brings the heart to its knees. The huge motional crescendo is drawn with wide intervals and slow marching, the top of the arc so searing it threatens to break the piano in half. However, the moment passes with a softly wrinkled denoument, its dissonance so subtle at pianissimo the audience isn't sure if they heard it correctly. If you can hear it correctly in the Donald-Gramm-at-Town-Hall performance (bookended by two Whitman non-leaves) below you'll probably also notice that he transposed everything down as to not embarrass himself. I can't guarantee he didn't make any memory slips, but thankfully the songs are good enough that I couldn't give a whoop-de crap. Join Donald and Ned in urbanity and horror, if you're not distracted by a cute boy passing by your café table.
Rorem was musically raised in post-WWII Paris, where urbanity and elegance were king, and To You meets both those criteria with a wry smile. The poem is the slightest of the slight, illuminating a moment of humanity that might as well not even exist for how ignored it is. The looping piano texture, elongated via a three-note cell underneath a four-noter, peddles along in the spirit of a brisk walk or casual bike ride, forcing the social contact to be fleeting. Oddly enough, the song's resolution is almost too tonal, a Neo-Classical ironicalism in keeping with the poem's tone. And wouldn't you know it, Rorem wrote it so fast he wrote down the time of day it was completed, as if he saw a cute boy pass by while sitting in a café in Hyères and couldn't bear to let him get away without a song.
A much darker Whitman is heard in Look Down, Fair Moon, taken from his Civil War sequence Drum-Taps. Rorem blew everybody out of the water in 1970 with his devastating Drum-Taps-sourced cycle War Scenes, but this song predates it by more than a decade and is composed in a noticeably different style (his original style). Much like To You the poem captures a fleeting emotion, but it's the kind of emotion that brings the heart to its knees. The huge motional crescendo is drawn with wide intervals and slow marching, the top of the arc so searing it threatens to break the piano in half. However, the moment passes with a softly wrinkled denoument, its dissonance so subtle at pianissimo the audience isn't sure if they heard it correctly. If you can hear it correctly in the Donald-Gramm-at-Town-Hall performance (bookended by two Whitman non-leaves) below you'll probably also notice that he transposed everything down as to not embarrass himself. I can't guarantee he didn't make any memory slips, but thankfully the songs are good enough that I couldn't give a whoop-de crap. Join Donald and Ned in urbanity and horror, if you're not distracted by a cute boy passing by your café table.
~PNK
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