Poetry and Music

Lloyd Schwartz is Frederick S. Troy Professor of English at the University of Massachusetts Boston, Classical Music Editor of The Boston Phoenix, and a regular commentator for NPR's Fresh Air. His most recent book of poems is Cairo Traffic (University of Chicago Press), and he is co-editor of Elizabeth Bishop: Poems, Prose, and Letters for the Library of America. His poems, articles, and reviews have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Vanity Fair, The New Republic, The Paris Review, The Pushcart Prize, and The Best American Poetry. In 1994, he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism. 

Lloyd has agreed to post regularly over the next several weeks about the progress of the thrilling project he describes below.  Thank you, Lloyd.  -- sdh

June 25, 2008:  Before

Last February, I received a delightful invitation from the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Karen Leopardi, the Associate Director for Faculty and Guest Artists at the Tanglewood Music Center, sent me an email asking me to participate in a poetry project with the composition fellows at Tanglewood this summer. This year's composer in residence, Shulamit Ran, the Israeli-born Pulitzer Prize winning musician who has served as composer-in-residence for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and the Chicago Lyric Opera, decided that she wanted the six composers working with her this summer to concentrate on vocal music—each of them setting a poem by the same poet. I was the poet she selected.

I would meet with the composers a couple of times to talk to them about my poems and answer any questions they might have for me. And one more thing. At the Contemporary Music Festival this summer, the featured events are works by Elliott Carter, celebrating his 100th birthday (this coming December). I’m a longstanding Carter aficionado. He’s done some fascinating and ambitious settings of contemporary poetry, including works by Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Lowell, John Ashbery, three major 20th century Italian poets (Ungaretti, Quasimodo, and Montale), and a symphony (his Symphony for Three Orchestras) inspired by Hart Crane. In college, he was an English major; early in his career he did evocative and shockingly tuneful settings of Frost and Emily Dickinson. I’m also something of an expert on Bishop (I just edited the Library of America volume Elizabeth Bishop: Poems, Prose, and Letters—virtually her collected works). So Tanglewood has also asked me to talk to the composer-fellows about Carter’s Bishop cycle, A Mirror on Which to Dwell, which will be performed at the festival. On July 29th, there’d be a concert at the Chamber Music Hall at which the settings of my poems would be performed. At the end of the concert, I’d also participate in a discussion about musical settings of poetry with Shulamit Ran and John Harbison (the director of the Contemporary Music Festival at Tanglewood, and a brilliant text-setter himself).

Would I be interested?

I suspect most poets would be thrilled—who wouldn't want to hear what one's poems sounded like to someone else? There’ve been some extraordinary, revelatory musical settings of poetry (also some terrible ones). It would be wonderful to be a “collaborator” in a new masterpiece. I’ve been traveling around the country speaking about Elizabeth Bishop and giving readings of her poems. It’s been a joy. But how satisfying in the midst of all these Bishop events to have something in which my own work was the center of attention. But maybe this invitation even meant something more to me. I’ve been writing poems seriously for nearly fifty years. But I’ve also been a music critic for more than thirty years. Rarely does a door ever open between these two compartments of my life. Now it has!

Comments

[Joe]

I'm sorry. I'm confused. Will you or will you not be there?

[Lloyd Schwartz]

Yes--I'll certainly be there, meeting with the composer-fellows and at the concert of their settings, July 29. I'll have more to say here about how my meetings with the composers progress.

[Molly Arden]

Congratulations on the honor.
I've tried listening to Eliot Carter but find I don't respond to his music. Anything I should listen for?

Molly

[Lloyd]

Dear Molly--Thank you. I suggest starting with early Carter. The gorgeous Cello Sonata and the String Quartet No. 1 are very beautiful and very moving (I think the long slow part of the First Quartet is one of the most haunting, heartstopping, mysterious pieces of music I know--Carter said it was inspired by being out in the desert). There are also the even earlier and very traditionally melodic choral settings of Robert Frost ("The Rose Family," "Dust of Snow") and Emily Dickinson ("Musicians Wrestle Everywhere," "Heart Not So Heavy As Mine"). If you're captivated by these, then there's a real chance you might enjoy his later work, though that can be more "difficult." One way to think about Carter's music is to regard the different instruments as characters in a play, having a love scene or an argument (it's an approach Carter himself acknowledges). Some of his very recent pieces are amazingly lively, colorful, even youthful. His cycle of Italian poems, "Tempo e tempi" ("Time and tempos"), is very appealing. For me his music is full of feeling, insinuation, suspense, drama, even when it's not tuneful in the way most of us are used to. Please let me know if any of this advice is helpful.

[betsy retallack]

Lloyd,
I am so thrilled for you that your work is now complimented with music. I can see that you are a classical music critic but have you tried mixing jazz with your poetry as well? I have found great fun in this myself with my jazz pianist husband on many performances. Betsy

[Molly]

Thank you for the explanation. I just listened to a piece by Charles Wuorinen called "Ashberyana." I wonder what you think of the piece and of the composer. It starts with a solo trombone, dramatically, and the purely instrumental parts (keyboard and strings as well as brass) are interesting in the way that excellent movie music is. But the words as sung just sound like noise. Anyway I wonder whether you have an opinion.

[Lloyd]

Hi again--I don't know Wuorinen's Ashbery piece, but your description sounds pretty close to my own responses to other things by him I've heard. Did you read that he was commissioned to do an opera based on Brokeback Mountain? Yippy-ka-yo oy-vey!