Settings of Prose and Poetry on New Kallor Album

from Amazon.com

This coming Friday Single Noon Records will release its second album of vocal music composed by Gregg Kallor. The title of the first album was Exhilaration – Dickinson and Yeats Songs. The new album is entitled The Tell-Tale Heart; and, as may be guessed from that title, Kallor has expanded his interest to take on prose as well as poetry. In fact, the title track, which uses an adaptation of the original text of Edgar Allan Poe’s short story, accounts for less than 25 minutes of the album. It is followed by eleven tracks of settings of poems by a diverse collection of poets, all writing in the English language. All texts are sung by soprano Melody Moore; and the Poe setting has an obligato cello part, played by Joshua Roman.

Listening to Kallor’s settings, I found myself wondering if mine were the last generation raised to understand that, with very few counterexamples, literature is best appreciated when it is read viva voce. As is the case with music, a printed text is merely marks on paper. Oral delivery of that text may not be exclusively necessary; but, when compared with “silent reading,” it often goes much further and much more efficiently towards conveying the rich multidimensionality of that text. This is as true of prose as it is of poetry; and I had the good fortune to encounter a staged reading of a text that I would have taken to be the ultimate counterexample of my assertion, an excerpt from James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake!

My primary impression of this album is that Kallor never bothered to take the time to read aloud the texts he wished to set (or, perhaps, to ask someone familiar with a text to read it to him). Ultimately, all he has done is hang his notes on syllables; and none of the authors on this album fare very well in the face of such a treatment. Where Poe is concerned, I gather than the premiere performance involved a fair amount of staging, which can compensate for many shortcomings, including words set so clumsily that a listener would require a text sheet to identify just what they were. In the absence of such staging (as on this album), the listener will quickly find herself/himself at sea as to how the narrative is unfolding, even if (s)he is already well acquainted with that narrative.

Where poetry is concerned, Kallor seems to suffer from a bad case of long-windedness that makes for a poor fit to a poet’s capacity for brevity. This is most evident in the penultimate track, a setting of “A Prayer” by Clementine Von Radics. This poem is only four lines, and it is almost like a Western version of a haiku. I tried reading it aloud with what I felt was the proper rhetorical shaping. By my watch it took me twenty seconds. The track of Moore singing Kallor’s setting lasts almost five minutes! Say no more.