I've decided to enter Surrey University's Joyce Dixey composition competition which has run annually since the 80s. Given that it's rather early days in my formal composition "journey" (as we must now apparently term any personal learning process), this is probably a tad ambitious, but what the hell, it's what I've signed up to with this Master's course, after all.
I'm going to have a crack at writing "art song". As per the title of this post, I think I might have bitten off quite a chunk. For one thing, I've never written any kind of song at all. The whole process is genuinely more baffling to me than, say, writing a symphony. OK, that's an over-claim, but what I mean here is that I can at least grasp how someone can write a piece for full orchestra, albeit after years of study and training, but songwriting seems to me a dark art that involves some kind of divinely inspired channeling. (Of course, I know that's bollocks, too. Case in point... One of the most revelatory listens of all my hundreds of hours of lockdown listening was the 5CD Joni Mitchell Archive Vol 1, which collates dozens and dozens of her earliest non-commercial recordings made between 1963 and 1967, and makes clear that her debut album Song to a Seagull wasn't a bolt from the heavens but the result of half a decade of working on others' songs, of constant experiment, trial and error and, well, sheer grind. Anyway, I digress... )
Furthermore, I'm a relative latecomer to art song. Having grown up surrounded by 60s and 70s pop music, "classical" singing was always a tough listen for me: somehow too artificial, too forced. I came round somewhat with a conversion to opera in my early 40s, but chamber song, not so much. It didn't help that a great body of the form's work is essentially 19th century Romantic music, another blind spot for me for so long. Ian Bostridge was my gateway drug. Both his recording of Schubert's Winterreise and the engrossing, poly-mathematical book he wrote about song cycle were ear-opening for me. (Sarah and I also saw Bostridge in concert at the Wigmore Hall with jazz pianist Brad Mehldau around the same time, and that pretty much sealed the deal.)
The choice of art song for this competition was at least in part pragmatic, and based on available resources (something that's actually informed most of my compositional choices on the programme so far). I'm delighted that my fellow student Yi Zhang, a fine mezzo-soprano, has accepted my invitation to record what I write, and perform it in the unlikelihood that I win. The accompaniment, needless to say, will be guitar, and on that front I'll be forced to write something that I can actually play. I'm using two, or possibly three of Elizabeth Barrett Browning's early sonnets as source material. I'd originally considered Emily Dickinson, but her poems have been set to music a lot, and I thought this might be a good opportunity to read a poet I barely know at all*.
As ever when approaching this kind of challenge, I've thrown myself into a bit of a frenzy of listening and score-reading. I'm studying two pieces in particular detail: Britten's Songs from the Chinese and Leo Brouwer's Canciones Amatorias. Here's the aforementioned Bostridge and the astounding Xuefei Yang performing "The Big Chariot", which opens the Britten cycle:
And here's the Meninas Duo perfoming one of the Brouwer songs (also stunning stuff):
OK, that's a high bar, clearly, but learn (ie. pilfer) from the best and all that.
The first real challenge (well, apart from, you know, actually having any musical ideas) is scansion. Even given the sonnet's fairly strict syllabic structure, finding a rhythmic pattern that both makes some kind of musical sense and actually meets the words at least halfway is bloody hard. Or at least it is for me. I've started with the 1844 sonnet "Perplexed Music":
Experience, like a pale musician, holds
A dulcimer of patience in his hand,
Whence harmonies, we cannot understand
Of God’s will in his worlds, the strain unfolds
In sad-perplexed minors: deathly colds
Fall on us while we hear, and countermand
Our sanguine heart back from the fancyland
With nightingale in visionary wolds.
We murmur ‘Where is any certain tune
Or measured music in such notes as these?’
But angels, leaning from the golden seat,
Are not so minded; their fine ear hath won
The issue of completed cadences,
And, smiling down the stars, they whisper – SWEET
It's a good place to start: the musical allusions ("sad perplexed minors", "completed cadences") give me at least something to hold on to. And the clear tonal change at "But angels..." suggests a musical change of gears. The trick will be to avoid obviousness, I think. One thing the process is forcing me to do is start with melody, as opposed with harmonic structure, which is my usual jumping-off point. Let's see where it goes. The most I can say at this point is that my initial work on the piece hasn't been too discouraging.
One last thing, I only discovered after deciding to enter the competition that this year's adjudicator is going to be Gary Ryan. This whole thing was already daunting. Putting my efforts under the nose of one of the greatest living composers for the instrument has hardly made it less so. Oy veh. More soon.
* For other Barrett Browning newbies out there, check out this illuminating British Library talk by poet Fiona Sampson, who's written an acclaimed biography of EBB, Two Way Mirror:
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