Tacoma, 1974 —

As a teenager, I was into all kinds of art — sketching, painting, reading plays, and writing poetry. Lots of poems, my way of a kind of diary writing, expressing to myself the places, relationships, and feelings. (I won’t reveal any of this naive creative work here.)

Later, two poems in particular were written at major turning points in my professional and personal life. That’s when I started setting poems as art song lyrics. Some of the musical material for what became Landscapes in Motion was first set in the 1970s, and some in the 1990s, now reworked with a more mature 21^st-century craft, while preserving the original dark suppleness of tonality and time.

Upon completing my master’s degree at Michigan in 1972, I taught music theory as a one-year lecturer at Indiana University in Bloomington. Another one-year fill-in position took me to Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma, Washington, where I got great experience teaching music theory, composition, new music performance ensemble, and even trombone!

Without a doctorate, however, there was no real prospect of winning a permanent professor position anywhere. And continuing a succession of one-year gigs moving all over the country was not sustainable. What to do?

I had taken my sailboat with me all the way out to Tacoma from Interlochen. After a beautiful sunset sail on Lake Spanaway in my little 15-foot “Butterfly” dinghy, I wrote a poem.

                        “Sailing at sunset”  (1974)

Dusty dusk settling silk on dying silver of wave-modulated water,
the sail still silently searching for a departing breeze,
swinging gently its boom and softly rattling its blocks
in confounded cross-rhythms to the lapping shore.
Streams of crimson flowing dust streak the sky
above looming shadowed firs.
Deepening shadows settle dark dust on the deck
while still the mast peak rages red and soars into a deepening sky.
Scorched face soothed by the oncoming night breeze,
eyes searching the sunset sky for sign of tomorrow’s wind.
Where will we sail then? Wherever wind wills . . .
and a new dusk consume our shadows.

Afterglow

Turns out, I went back to Michigan for doctoral studies, and went back to working at Interlochen as assistant to the director of Michigan’s university-level program there. In that 1975 summer, I met Beth, a journalist working a temp gig on the camp’s publicity staff.

We fell in love, and I spent many weekends of the following academic year riding the Amtrak Turboliner from Ann Arbor to Chicago to be with her. I wrote a poem on one of those train rides, again uncertain about my (our) future.

                        “Riding backwards on a train”   (1976)

The cider mill beside the river,
cows grazing by a dead tree,
a red barn stuffed with hay.
An old square house alone on a hilltop,
a church’s silent steeple above the trees,
a country cemetery, old stone crosses guarding against oblivion.
Then the sun is gone,
storm clouds ripple across meadow skies,
the river turns away.
Riding backwards on a train, frozen fields float by.
Glossy sheets of white ice glow with winter sun.
Dead brown stubble breaks the mirror, patchy footprints of autumn’s retreat.
Pale late light of afternoon flickering
through leafless trees that line the lifeless fields in rows,
through fields of withered cornstalks.
Leap into brown dry woods, plunge past barren trees,
spray a wake of fallen leaves, lunge into holy autumn stillness,
riding backwards on a train, headed east into a frozen future.

Shortly before his death, Charles Ives published a collection of 114 Songs in 1922. Many have become exemplars of his iconic 20th-century American style. Here are two that fit our tender twilight theme.

LISTEN > YouTube

LISTEN > YouTube

Before night

So far, I haven’t mentioned an important influence on my ’60s and ’70s immersion into the mid-century Avant Garde. In the 1960s, Luciano Berio wrote an influential, frequently performed series of unaccompanied solos for varied instruments. All are tour-de-force virtuosic technical displays with a theatrical impact. I performed Sequenza V for trombone on a Contemporary Directions concert in Rackham Lecture Hall (Ann Arbor). It was commissioned by and written for virtuoso trombonist Stuart Dempster, with whom I later briefly studied.

I said instruments, but Sequenza III (1965) is for unaccompanied voice, drastically different than a typical “song.” Berio explains:

“In Sequenza III the emphasis is given to the sound symbolism of vocal and sometimes visual gestures, with their accompanying ‘shadows of meaning,’ and the associations and conflicts suggested by them. For this reason, Sequenza III can also be considered as a dramatic essay whose story is the relationship between the soloist and her own voice.”

Sequenza III was written in 1965 for Cathy Berberian. The “modular” text is by Markus Kutter:

Give me a few words for a woman
to sing a truth allowing us
to build a house without worrying before night comes

Ice

In 1983, teaching grad courses and still directing the New Music Performance Lab. Musicology master’s student Robert Nasow played cello in the ensemble, but he was also an avid and talented poet.

When his fellow grad music student David Lynn Kennedy was killed, Robert wrote a heartfelt elegy for him.

                        “Ice Floe“

Yes, I am cold . . .
my hands are cold to the touch.
Something must fill this hollow at the center of my body.
Untouched, no one will long remember your face . . .
She withdraws to contemplate the child,
her voice breaks into emerald light, effulgent pure water,
sings unknown distances of sleep.
Brittle, come break off my hand,
this glazed stem of Queen Anne’s lace.
There are ways of living we have never dreamed of.

His poem became a lovely vehicle for a memorial song, which was premiered by UNT grad students who were also involved in new music with me.

Jing Ling Tam, soprano

Paul LeBlanc, guitar