On a Saturday afternoon in June, the Texas hill country enlivened by bursts of rain alternating with brilliant sunlight, I attended a salon concert at a private home. The concert featured eight new works, all of them art songs or song cycles for voice and piano, by members of the Composers Alliance of San Antonio. And one of these new works was mine: Three Thoreau Sentences, a setting, as you might guess, of three (lengthy) sentences by Henry David Thoreau (1817-62), all taken from the “Sounds” chapter in Walden (1854).
One of the chapters in Pathways to Music is about “reading and rereading” the Romantic Lied, or art song. In that chapter I write about Beethoven and Schubert’s settings of Goethe’s poem “Kennst du das Land” from the novel Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (1795-6) and about the imagined “dialogue” between the poet and the composers over the “catalyst” of the poem. Beethoven and Schubert read “Kennst du das Land” differently, based in part on their understanding of what that poem means in the context of Goethe’s novel.
I did something similar in composing Three Thoreau Sentences. Although all three sentences are taken from the same chapter, I arranged them in a different order and, of course, removed them from their original context in Thoreau’s paragraphs. It occurs to me that this is pretty willful “dialogue,” almost amounting to a kind of distortion of the original text. Take the second sentence in my piece: “They are the spirits, the low sprits and melancholy forebodings, of fallen souls that once in human shape night-walked the earth and did the deeds of darkness, now expiating their sins with their wailing hymns or threnodies in the scenery of their transgressions.” (What a sentence – only in the nineteenth century!) But what does it mean? In Walden, this sentence belongs to a section about the disembodied sounds of owls, which Thoreau hears at his retreat on Walden Pond. It is originally, therefore, a kind of playful fantasy about what those other-worldly owl sounds mean. Thoreau doesn’t really believe that owls are “low spirits” haunting the site of their crimes; he’s just letting his imagination run wild.
When I remove that context – that Thoreau is writing (playfully) about owls – what does the sentence come to mean to a performer, and to a listener?
One of the reasons this particular example interests me is because the performers of my piece, mezzo-soprano Valerie Jeannin and pianist Zachary Ridgway, brought it up in one of our rehearsal sessions. “Did we ever find out what these low spirits are?” asked Zachary. “Yes!” Valerie responded. “They’re screech owls!” Valerie had gone to Thoreau’s Walden to look this up, it turns out. I added a few more words of explanation, concluding that the passage can be interpreted in a different way because of its new context between the other two “sentences.” Zachary heard and understood but seemed a little less than wholly satisfied with Valerie’s matter-of-fact answer or my more ambiguous one.
(Zachary Ridgway and Valerie Jeannin in rehearsal, June 2018. Photo by the author.)
Of course, it’s not at all what I want as a composer to insist on one understanding of my piece or of Thoreau’s text. It occurred to me on reflection that my conversation with Valerie and Zachary was a perfect example of art song doing what it does so well: opening up a dialogue that by design leads not to easy conclusions but to further dialogue. Art song is an invitation to explore different readings in the context of performance.
What were Valerie and Zachary thinking, I wonder, when they performed that second sentence during Saturday’s salon concert? Notes and rhythms? Owls? Other pieces that they had encountered before that share certain characteristics? Other things that I hadn’t anticipated?
After the performance, several attendees mentioned aspects of that second sentence to me. One, a fellow composer, said, “That section seems different from a lot of your music; it sounded like you were using an octatonic pitch collection there.” Another said, “Oh yes, that section was sort of diabolical,” but the smile on her face told me as much as her words – that she heard a playful sort of diabolism. And that comment seemed to me, again on reflection, to get right to the heart of Thoreau’s sentence in its original context. For all the distortion and change to which I subjected poor Thoreau, this listener had heard in my setting exactly what I perceived as the spirit of the original. As a composer, I couldn’t ask for more, and I imagine that Beethoven and Schubert would have felt the same way.
(The image from Walden is in the public domain. All other images courtesy the author. All rights reserved.)