At the end of last month, the Chordless duo of soprano Sara LeMesh and pianist Allegra Chapman uploaded two videos to YouTube. The first of these was based on a performance of George Crumb’s “The Night in Silence Under Many a Star.” Joseph Dwyer created a film of his own impressions of the Chordless performance, using an audio recording engineered by Matt Carr as the soundtrack. The film itself was given an online premiere on the evening of May 30, when it was uploaded to YouTube, initially for live streaming. This was followed by an online Q&A session moderated by Kate McKinney. Those that had seen the “live” premiere could then view a live feed of all four members of the creative team discussing their practices and learnings through a YouTube stream, which included a chat space in which questions could be posed by viewers and answered by the members of that creative team. That entire session was then uploaded to YouTube (without the chat text) as a second video, roughly an hour in duration.
The first page of George Crumb’s Apparition (from a blog page posted by the College of Music at the University of Colorado Boulder)
“The Night in Silence Under Many a Star” is the first movement of a six-movement cycle by George Crumb entitled Apparition - Elegiac Songs and Vocalises. Readers may recall that Chordless performed four of these movements at the end of this past January as part of the program they prepared for Old First Concerts. All the movements were settings of selections from sixteen poems that Walt Whitman had collected under the title When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d, a collection which, in turn, was absorbed into a larger collection, Memories of President Lincoln.
The operative word in Crumb’s title is “Elegiac.” The entire cycle is a reflection on death inspired by poems that Whitman wrote in the wake of the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. Crumb’s personal inspiration was then realized through fragmentation. Five of the six movements extract modest collections of lines (not always consecutive) from the fourteenth of the sixteen poems in Whitman’s collection. The exception is the second movement, which extracts two non-consecutive lines from the very first poem, from which the title of the entire collection is taken.
From a musical point of view, Crumb develops a rich vocabulary of both instrumental and vocal sonorities, which reflect the elegiac spirit of the libretto that he mines from the original Whitman text. I would even hypothesize that it is the prevailing darkness of those sonorities that sets the mood for the film that Dwyer created. Thus, the compounding of Carr’s recording of the Chordless performance with Dwyer’s cinematic imagery provides the substance for the partnership of sound and image. This partnership, taken on its own terms, should make for a sufficient experience. I have previously noted, that listening to any of the Apparition movements benefits significantly from a text sheet, at least for those feeling it is important to know what the words are. However, since the film did not provide the text through subtitles, one could either acquire a text sheet (for which there is a Web page that mis-numbered the source poem for five of the movements) or one could dispense with text semantics and focus only on the filmed images.
Personally, I tend to prefer the sonorities over clarity of text. Crumb’s skill in imaginative creations of the former matter (at least to me) more than the latter. In that case, however, anyone not familiar with the motives behind Whitman’s poem might not be able to grasp the elegiac qualities of either the music for the cinematic imagery. At best one might grasp only the melancholy of both the music and the film, but that much may be sufficient. After all, Whitman had summoned a massive armory of words to reflect on Lincoln’s passing; and the fragments that Crumb excerpted are not really sufficient to do justice with what the poet had in mind.
In other words the video for “The Night in Silence Under Many a Star” is best taken on its own terms. It should not take the attentive listener/viewer long to apprehend those terms. Given that the song is a little shy of six minutes in duration, such apprehension should be sufficient!
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