The Obscure Composer: Everything So Far

The past two years, starting in the Summer of 2010, have been very productive. In the genre of art songs alone I've written over a hundred new pieces. So it seemed like an update of my works list was long overdue.

It was an interesting exercise. For instance, I've written three song cycles this year with "bells" in the title; I guess that's what happens when Japanese poets and Zen poets provide a lot of my texts. And now everything's in nice folders, organized by genre; as part of that effort, I discovered that one of the songs in my Japanese Dedications cycle isn't filed where it should be, so tomorrow I'll be rummaging around looking for it.

Here it is, the list of all my completed pieces (not counting mere school assignments).

Instrumental works

Satori: Trio for piano, cello or bassoon, violin or flute [1982-83/1985-87]
1. The Bell
2. Haiku
3. Tanka
4. Koan
5. Sugar or Salt?
6. The Orderly Garden
7. Prelude and Fugue
8. WWHH²
9. mu
10. Mud Under a Brick
11. Tanka
12. Haiku
13. When the Pebble Hits the Stick
14. Satori

Bystander soundtrack [2006]
1. Opening
2. Eichmann
3. Head Wound
4. My Lai
5. Rwanda
6. End

Enigmatic Preludes [2010]
1-10

Pastorale for solo piano [2011]

Seasons: Haiku for solo piano [2011]
1. Summer grass/Where warriors dream (Basho/trans. Rexroth)
2. Against far off snow mountains/Two crows are flying. (Murakami Kijo/trans. Rexroth)
3. Frozen in the ice/A maple leaf. Masaoka Shiki/trans. Rexroth)
4. A blind child/Guided by his mother,/Admires the cherry blossoms (Kikaku/trans. Rexroth)

Snowy Morning [2012]
1. Snow on wooden fence
2. Falling lace
3. Grey and white morning

Reflections – Duo for B-flat clarinet and cello [2012]

Gymnopedie #4 for solo piano [2012]

Choral – SATB except as specified

Chorale: The Pink Church (William Carlos Williams) [1983] – SSAA

The Revelation Concerning Babylon [1984]
1. The Declaration of the Angel (Revelation 18:2-8)
2. The Lamentation of Kings and Merchants (Revelation 18:10-20)
3a. The Judgment of the Angel (Revelation 18:21-24)
3b. The Approval of the Multitude in Heaven (Revelation 19:1-3)

O magnum mysterium (liturgical) [1985]

Mass (liturgical) [1985] – text is the same as in Bach's B minor Mass, and thus in some minor points does not match the current text of the Roman Catholic Mass

Three Favors (Holtje) [1986]
1. Clouds of cold will
2. Slowly, warily
3. Particles of camphor

David's Lamentation (II Samuel I:19-27, English version) – countertenor, SATB, oboe, 3 trombones [1986]
David's Lamentation (Hebrew version)

Song cycles - soprano and piano except as indicated

Poems (Steve Holtje)
1. Permanence [1982]
2. Song for Grace [1983]
3. Turn of Events [1983]
4. We Know [1984]
5. Teleological Universe [1984]

Eight Poems of William Carlos Williams
1. To a Solitary Disciple [1983]
2. Quietness [1983/2011]
3. Two Plums (This Is Just to Say/To a Poor Old Woman) [1983]
4. The Locust Tree in Flower [1983]
5. Between Walls [2012]
6. To Be Recited to Flossie on Her Birthday [1983]
7. The Descent [2011]
[discarded: At the Ballgame (one verse recycled for Quietness)]
[in progress, though may be separate: Asphodel, That Greeny Flower]

Orpheus Sonnets (Rainer Maria Rilke, in German)
Book I
1. Da steig ein Baum [1984/2011]
2. Un fast ein Mädchen wars [1984/2011]
3. Ein Gott vermags [1985]
4. O ihr Zärtlichen, tretet zuweilen [1984]
5. Errichtet keinen Denkstein [1985]
6. Ist er ein Hiesiger
7. Rühmen, das ists
8. Nur im Raum der Rühmung [1984-5]
9. Nur wer die Leier schon hob [1984]
10. Euch, die ihr nie mein Gefühl verliesst [2001/2010-11]
11. Sieh den Himmel [1984]
12. Heil dem Geist [1984]
13. Voller Apfel, Birne und Banane [2001/2011]
14. Wir gehen um mit Blume [2001/2011]
15. Wartet…, das schmeckt [2001/2011]
16. Du, mein Freund [2001/2011]
17. Zu unterst der Alte [1984]
18. Hörst du das Neue [1984]
19. Wandelt sich rasch auch die Welt [1985]
20. Dir aber, Herr [2001/2011]
21. Frühling is wiedergekommen [1984]
22. Wir sind die Treibenden [1984]
23. Oerst dann [1985]
24. Sollen wir unsere uralte Freundschaft
25. Dich aber will ich nun [1984]
26. Du aber, Göttlicher

Book II (in progress)
1. Atmen du unsichtbares Gedicht [1996/2011]
2. So wie dem Meister [1982/2010]
3. Spiegel noch nie hat man wissend beschrieben [1982/2010-11]
4. O dieses is das Tier [1982/2010]
5. Blumenmuskel [2010-11]
9. Rühmt euch, ihr Richtenden [2010]
27. Gibt es wirklich die zeit [1996/2011]
28. O komm und geh [1996 or 2001/2010]
29. Stiller Freund der vielen Fernen [1996 or 2001/2010-11]

from Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (Ludwig Wittgenstein)
1. The world is everything that is the case
2. Whereof one cannot speak

Japanese Dedications [2010-11]
1. I should not have waited (Lady Akazome Emon/trans. Kenneth Rexroth)
2. Do not smile to yourself (Sakanoe/trans. Rexroth)
3. Amidst the notes (Yosano Akiko/trans. Rexroth)
4. Left on the beach (Yosano Akiko/trans. Rexroth)
5. Like tiny golden (Yosano Akiko/trans. Rexroth)
6. Once, far over the breakers (Yosano Akiko/trans. Rexroth)
7. To love somebody (Lady Kasa Yakamochi/trans. Rexroth)
8. When spring escapes (Princess Nukada/trans. Kenneth Rexroth & Ikuko Atsumi)
9. The stars pass (Empress Jito/trans. Rexroth & Atsumi)
10. This life of yours would not cause you sorrow (Murasaki Shikibu/trans. Rexroth & Atsumi)
11. From the North send a message (Murasaki Shikibu/trans. Rexroth & Atsumi)
12. The troubled waters & The memories of long love (Murasaki Shikibu/trans. Rexroth & Atsumi)
13. I can no longer tell dream from reality (Lady Akazome Emon/trans. Rexroth & Atsumi)
14. The leaves of the bush clover rustle (Kenrei Mon-in Ukyo no Daibu/trans. Rexroth & Atsumi)
15. Grasshoppers (Kawai Chigetsu-Ni/trans. Rexroth & Atsumi)
16. Cats making love in the temple (Kawai Chigetsu-Ni/trans. Rexroth & Atsumi)
17. Be careful! (Ome Shushiki/trans. Rexroth & Atsumi)
18. The fireflies' light (Chine-Jo/trans. Rexroth & Atsumi)
19. Everyone is asleep (Enomoto Seifu-Jo/trans. Rexroth & Atsumi)
20. How beautiful the Buddhist statues (Imaizumi Sogetsu-Ni/trans. Rexroth & Atsumi)
21. There is nothing like the cool (Tagami Kikusha-Ni/trans. Rexroth & Atsumi)
22. A bird comes (Yosano Akiko/trans. Rexroth & Atsumi)
23. I have the delusion (Yosano Akiko/trans. Rexroth & Atsumi)
24. Is it because you always hope (Yosano Akiko/trans. Rexroth & Atsumi)
25. My heart is like the sun (Yosano Akiko/trans. Rexroth & Atsumi)
26. Sweet and sad (Yosano Akiko/trans. Rexroth & Atsumi)
27. All day long having (Okamoto Kanoko/trans. Rexroth & Atsumi)
28. Scattered petals gather on the road (Hatsui Shizue/trans. Rexroth & Atsumi)
29. Silently / time passes. (Hatsui Shizue/trans. Rexroth & Atsumi)
30. In the autumn when words sound (Baba Akiko/trans. Rexroth & Atsumi)
31. O brightness (Hoshino Tatsuko/trans. Rexroth & Atsumi)
32. You and me - Anonymous geisha song/trans. Rexroth & Atsumi)
33. Tokiwa Mountain's/pine trees.... (Ono no Komachi/trans. Jane Hirshfeld w/Mariko Aratani)
34. Seeing the moonlight (Ono no Komachi/trans. Hirshfeld w/Aratani)
35. If, in an autumn field (Ono no Komachi/trans. Hirshfeld w/Aratani)
36. See! The gleam (Fukuda Chiyo-ni/trans. Hirshfeld w/Aratani)
37. I think I will not go out again (Izumi Shikibu/trans. Hirshfeld w/Aratani)
38. I cannot say (Izumi Shikibu/trans. Hirshfeld w/Aratani)
39. Come quickly (Izumi Shikibu/trans. Hirshfeld w/Aratani)
40. As I dig for wild orchids (Izumi Shikibu/trans. Hirshfeld w/Aratani)
41. Although I try (Izumi Shikibu/trans. Hirshfeld w/Aratani)
42. Listen, listen (Izumi Shikibu/trans. Hirshfeld w/Aratani)
43. Beloved Buddha (Yosano Akiko/trans. Sanford Goldstein & Seishi Shinoda)
44. Lovely,/the tiny feet of a child (Yosano Akiko/trans. Goldstein & Shinoda)
45. Yet I remember once (Yosano Akiko/trans. Goldstein & Shinoda)
46. Spring is short! (Yosano Akiko/trans. Goldstein & Shinoda)
47. To punish (Yosano Akiko/trans. Goldstein & Shinoda)
48. Hide and Seek Piece (Yoko Ono)
49. Actor (Yuko Otomo)
50. Sheep (Kazuko Shiraishi)

5 Pomes Penyeach (James Joyce) [2011] baritone or mezzo with cello
1. Alone
2. She Weeps over Rahoon
3. Nightpiece
4. Watching the Needleboats at San Saba
5. Bahnhofstrasse

Songs of Death (Fumiko Nakajo, in Japanese) [2011]
1. shi ni chikaki
2. yo no kaze ni
3. no wo kesh'te

Songs of Mortality (Fumiko Nakajo, trans. Hatsue Kawamura & Jane Reichhold) [2011]
1. a lighthouse
2. ice patterns on the sea
3. unseen things
4. shining scissors
5. after death
6. as I tried to touch
7. without comfort
8. a day of budding
9. Live as long as you can
10. close to death
11. lost under the cover of the night wind
12. with the light off
(10-12 are translations/adaptations of Songs of Death)

Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird (Wallace Stevens) [2012]
I-XIII

Of the Surface of Things (Wallace Stevens) [2012]
1. In my room
2. From my balcony
3. The gold tree is blue

For Jeff & Brooke (Anon. Japanese/trans. Rexroth) [2012]
1. Like the tides' flood
2. We are, you and me

Bells [2012]
1. As I approach (Noin/trans. Rexroth]
2. Clear full moon (Anon. Japanese/trans. Rexroth)
3. Does the bell ring? (Anon. Japanese/trans. Rexroth)

A Shimmering Bell: Poems of Gary Snyder [2012]
1. Issa's Haiku
2. An autumn morning in Shokoku-ji/December at Yase
3. Lying in Bed on a Late Morning
4. from Little Songs for Gaia
5. from Regarding Wave

The Sound of a Bell: Six Poems of Yuko Otomo [2012]
1. Cornell Box #5: Celestial Navigation by Birds
2. Shoes
3. A Rose Is a Rose #4
4. Wind and clouds
5. Moonlit night
6. Coming full circle

Individual songs – soprano and piano except as indicated

You (Holtje) [1987-89]
Later (Holtje) – solo vocal
From the Book of Ice (Steve Dalachinsky) - soprano and double bass [2006]
Naga Uta "Utsusemito omoishi" (Hitomaro) baritone & piano [2010]
Eternity (William Blake) [2011]
Elegy for Eiji (wordless) [2011]
from The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock (T.S. Eliot) [2012]

Yes, I know that anyone who sets passages of Wittgenstein to music is probably not right in the head.

The Obscure Composer, Part 1: 5 Pomes Penyeach recording is finished!

It's amazing how much work it can be to turn the visual lines and dots into a permanent sonic record. The gestation period for these five short songs, totalling less than six minutes, was over eleven months.

They were written quickly in late-night sessions, four of them in a five-day period (April 29 through May 2), then one more a couple of weeks later (5/14 [and revised a month after that]). I started rehearsing them soon after that with my good friend Kate Leahy, a soprano I know from my days in New Amsterdam Singers. I played the cello part on piano, and that's how it was performed at its premiere during a salon on July 9.

On August 15, Marc McCarron recorded Suzanne Mueller playing the cello parts in their home studio on Long Island. Kate overdubbed her vocal parts on January 5 at Kevin Keller's home studio in Inwood. And this past Monday (4/2) I returned to Kevin's place, where over the course of a challenging five-and-a-half hour session he edited, mixed, and mastered the tracks.

And now you can listen to them on my Soundcloud!

There's more to come: a new electronica artist, Black Crystal Fuck Wolf, is creating remixes of these songs.

More About Songs of Death and Fumiko Nakajo

Jane Reichhold, whose book Breasts of Snow - Fumiko Nakajo: Her tanka and her life taught me everything I know about Nakajo and provided the poems that I set in my new mini-cycle Songs of Death, has very generously given me permission to use the transliteration that she and coauthor Hatsue Kawamura (who, alas, has been in a coma for seven years) produced for the book, and also to quote them here in their entireties.

And, in very good news for anyone interested in reading these soul-shaking poems, Ms. Reichhold confirms what I saw in a 2004 review I found online: the book can be bought from her directly. She can be emailed at jane(at)ahapoetry(dot)com.

Here are the poems I set to music for Songs of Death, along with their translations:

shi ni chikaki
ware ni fuhen no
ai chikau
chinkon ka wa
hayakumo hibikeri

close to death
for me an everlasting
vow of love
in a requiem song
has begun to ring

yo no kaze ni
magire kitarite
waga nodo wo
yakusu sono te ga
tareka wa shireri

lost under the cover
of the night wind
my throat
is grabbed by a hand
and I know whose it is

hi wo keshite
shinobiyakani tonari ni
kuro nomo wo
keraku no gotoku ni
ima wa narashitsu

with the light off
stealthily something
moves to me
I have tamed it now
as if it were a pleasure

The Obscure Composer, Part 2: Songs of Death

The music I'm about to write about is in the post below this one. Sorry it's kind of fuzzy.

A brief mention of Japanese poet Fumiko Nakajo (I wish I could remember where) and her tragic life story sent me to Amazon.com, where I found a copy of Breasts of Snow - Fumiko Nakajo: Her tanka and her life, by Hatsue Kawamura and Jane Reichhold (The Japan Times), which I highly recommend if you can track it down (there were two listed: one for $20, and one for $350; I of course bought the $20 one). Nakajo (1922-54) wrote about being divorced before that was common in Japan, and then, when she had breast cancer, wrote about that as well, all the way through two mastectomies and practically to the moment of her death. Her first collection of poetry was published days before she died.

Initially I had picked out 30 of her poems that I might want to set to music. Then I went through and made a different selection of 21 specifically having to do with her battle with breast cancer, later narrowed to 15 and then 7. The first three I set were specifically about facing death, and didn't reference breast cancer, and ultimately I decided that they were enough, partly because that focus is more universal, partly because more would be too much of such an intense subject, partly because I just spent the afternoon revising those three to what I think is their final form, and frankly it was so draining that it left me nearly paralyzed for over an hour and I don't want to do any more of that. Yes, these poems are that powerful.

My previous song cycle drawing on the work of female Japanese poets is in English (see The Obscure Composer, Part 1), but for this one I somehow felt like daring to set the original Japanese. I did that once before with a long poem by Hitomaro and it was very difficult, but because these are shorter and modern, it wasn't quite as challenging from the technical point of view, and of course my Japanese wife was very helpful. It's weird how transliterations of Japanese don't always reflect the actual pronunciation; occasionally some syllables get elided. For instance, what's written as "narashitsu" Chie pronounces as "narash'tsu."

Back on October 22 I had written a one-page solo piano piece that was inspired by my love for a piano work by a much more famous composer. I'd mostly written it just for the fun of doing so and had no plans to deliver it to the world. Ha! I should know myself better than that; having it there practically waiting to be cannibalized made it irresistible to me when, on November 6, I finally got to work on setting Nakajo's poems. The piano piece's mood fit the mood I wanted for setting these poems: bittersweet without being too bitter. I also thought that since the three poems were linked thematically, it would be appropriate to have them linked musically as well by putting them into this existing framework as a triptych.

As far as length alone the fit was practically perfect, and after a couple evenings of work, they fit together well enough in terms of words onto melodies (only a little rejiggering required). As a set, however, they didn't work like that. They were too homogenous, and the poem in the middle was sufficiently different in mood that I felt the music didn't work with those words. I tried speeding up that section, but harmonically and melodically the homogeneity remained troubling. After fiddling with the harmony for a while without success, I came up with a drastic solution: I ditched all the harmony in that section, replacing it with the repeating minor second you can see in Song #2 in the post under this one. That fit the mood much better, while the retention of the melody kept the connecting link to the other two songs.

Can anyone tell from what remains after all that revision just what the original musical inspiration was? In other words, what was the piece by another composer that inspired the original piano piece I wrote? A small piece of its melody remains, quite significantly albeit with altered rhythmic emphasis.

Songs of Death

The Obscure Composer, Part 1: Enigmatic Preludes and my settings of James Joyce's Pomes Penyeach

Starting last year, I began spending more time at my piano. Often this meant playing Bach Inventions, Mendelssohn Songs Without Words, Debussy Preludes, and Mompou's Musica Callada. Sometimes it took the form of noodling, which occasionally turned into a composition. Under the spell of Mompou in particular, I began writing shorter and simpler music, entertaining myself rather than trying to be impressive to an imagined academic audience. Eventually I'd written eleven of these, which I dubbed Enigmatic Preludes and dedicated to a piano-loving (and playing) friend who was leaving NYC to teach down South.

Enigmatic_Preludes

Later in the year two friends, one half Japanese, got married and I picked a couple of translated tanka from The Tale of Genji and set them to music (voice and piano) as a small wedding gift. Most traditional Japanese poetry is very short; the tanka form consists of five lines. The emphasis, or goal, is to say something profound while using the simplest and most concise materials, and the stripped-down style I'd developed while imitating Mompou seemed a good fit.

I liked the result of my little wedding gift project so much that it inspired a lot more translated Japanese poem settings, but that's grist for another post, dedicated to that project. The reason I mention the Japanese settings is that the piano accompaniments I was writing were so simple that in many cases, though they were written for piano, they were monophonic - a single line of notes that could be played by almost any other instrument.

So when I started my next project (one night at the end of April when my wife's snoring was keeping me up), I decided to go all the way in this direction and write the accompaniment for cello instead of piano.

In the middle of last decade I'd helped a friend of a friend sort out her late father's apartment, in return for which I got to pick out many books and LPs for myself, one of which was the Faber and Faber edition of James Joyce's Pomes Penyeach, a collection of 13 poems from 1904-24. I'd started setting the last and latest-written poem, "A Prayer," in my old knotty, dissonant, thick style, but abandoned it; while going through some papers recently I found it and pondered revising it, but just plain decided it wasn't worth the trouble.

So that night when I was hiding from the snores, I picked out three of the darkest, least sentimental poems - "Bahnhofstrasse," "Alone," and "Watching the Needleboats at Saba" - noodled on the piano (basically, found some nice chord progressions and arpeggiated them), and by the following morning I had three new songs.

Alone
Bahnhofstrasse
Needle Boats

Yes, I'm so old-fashioned that I still use staff paper and ink!

A couple days later another one popped out: "She Weeps over Rahoon."

Rahoon

I thought those were all I'd set, but then one night in the middle of May I added the last and most difficult one, "Nightpiece." Getting the speech rhythms, structure, and flow right took a fair amount of revision; if you look at the sheet music you will see some evidence of meter changes, etc. because I made changes using white-out and haven't bothered making a clean copy. Hearing it in rehearsal provided important feedback for the revision.

Night Piece 1
Night Piece 2
Night Piece 3

The original idea was to have these sung by a male voice, partly because the author, Joyce, is male, partly because I thought I might give them a shot myself. But I'm very happy and fortunate to have a soprano friend, Kate Leahy (with whom I used to sing in the choir New Amsterdam Singers), who's willing to come out to Brooklyn and rehearse my songs. Earlier this year we had started out by learning my massive (and still uncompleted) cycle of Rilke's Orpheus Sonnets (in the original German), which I've been working on sporadically since 1984, but then I started revising a lot of them. So we switched over to these new pieces. They look simple, yes, but they're not easy to sing. I still like dissonance! We premiered all five Joyce songs at a party at my apartment a month ago (playing the cello part on piano). They went well, and now I'm going to record them, which I'll cover in my next post on this topic.