Lyrics Ain’t What They Used To Be!

Cover of how do I find you (courtesy of Verismo Communications)

As promised about 24 hours ago, I have revisited how do I find you, the cycle of seventeen songs, each with music by a different composer, which constituted the program that mezzo Sasha Cooke presented at Davies Symphony Hall this past Sunday evening. This time I listened to the program’s MP3 album, currently available for download from an Amazon.com Web page. Because the download includes the booklet with the texts of the poems, I used that version as my source for following the songs, rather than the program book I had used at Davies.

Yesterday I had observed that the semantics and rhetoric of each poem were so powerful that it was difficult to focus on the music. This time I had, at least to some extent, the opportunity to prioritize listening without having to observe the modest but powerful physical dramatics in Cooke’s delivery. Sadly, I came away feeling, once again, that the music itself was not particularly compelling, leaving me to wonder whether art song may have receded to the status of a distant historical artifact.

When we think of how art song thrived during the nineteenth century, we should probably begin by recognizing that reading poetry was more popular than it was before new media of sight and sound began to undermine the priority of reading over the course of the twentieth century. Those attending performances of art song two centuries ago were probably familiar with the writings of the likes of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Friedrich Schiller, Friedrich Rückert, and the folk poetry collected in Des Knaben Wunderhorn. During the early twentieth century, those poets tended to recede behind the more popular appeal of lyricists such as Ira Gershwin and particularly Cole Porter, who summed up the shift in priorities in a single couplet:

Good authors too who once knew better words

Now only use four-letter words writing prose

To be fair, there were composers that knew how to take on prose without compromising either their own creative skills or those of the source text. In many ways Samuel Barber’s “Knoxville: Summer of 1915” remains a powerful point of reference, even though it was composed over half a century ago. During the second half of the last century, Stephen Sondheim established himself through his skill for capturing compelling narrative through just the right interactions between music and words.These days it seems as if the standards set by the twentieth century have lost their impact just as much as those from the nineteenth.

Of course, I doubt that any of the seventeen composers that contributed to how do I find you had any thoughts of being compared to Sondheim or Barber, let alone Franz Schubert or Hugo Wolf. For that matter, my guess is that the enthusiastically positive impressions of most of the Davies audience were probably triggered by Cooke’s dramatic talents, which covered an impressively wide span of dispositions over the course of her recital. However, those talents were physical and, therefore, visual. Those listening to the recording of how do I find you are limited to words printed on a page and those rhetorical techniques that depend only on listening.

As I observed yesterday, the impact of those techniques was directed by the relevance of the texts being set to music. Those texts, in turn, established relevance through denotations and/or connotations that reflect on the human condition during the hard times of a pandemic. Personally, my own dispositions during these times have benefitted considerably from Danny Clay’s Music for Hard Times. Clay himself described his score as “a series of composed ‘calming exercises.’” Those exercises were realized through the combination of a recording of performances by The Living Earth Show, the duo of percussionist Andy Meyerson and guitarist Travis Andrews, with the projection of an ambient film created by Jon Fischer. Mind you, this is an unabashedly personal reaction, based on a preference for connotation, rather than denotation. (If I want denotation, I get it by reading The New York Review of Books!)

So, while I have added how do I find you to my library, I am not sure that I shall be revisiting it very often.