Elizabeth Raum: Renovated Rhymes, text by John V. Hicks
Malcolm Forsyth: The Dong with a Luminous Nose, text by Edward Lear
Alex Eddington: Eight Poems of Dennis Lee
Andrew Ager: Five Bagatelles, texts by various writers
Christopher Berg: Don't Let That Horse, text by Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Seymour Barab: A Little Light Music, text by anonymous
Robert Jordahl: Verses from Ogden Nash

The melancholy month of February provides all the excuse necessary for a musical antidote - a concert of humorous writings and settings of nonsense verse seems the perfect way to maintain sanity in this bleak season. On the other hand, such a programme can engage the intellect as well as divert it. The skewed perspective of "nonsense", like the many-faced heads of cubist paintings, the fanciful incongruities of Marc Chagall, or the melting watches of Salvador Dali, demands that we look at ordinary objects, familiar rhymes, old jokes, and universal experiences, from new - and perhaps more interesting - angles. So. . . . forget winter for a few hours, and let these strange and idiosyncratic shards of musical light illuminate your evening and anticipate brighter seasons to come.

Elizabeth Raum (b. 1945) - Renovated Rhymes, for tenor, violin and piano (1999)
Renovated Rhymes (for voice, viola, and piano) was commissioned by soprano Karen Peeler and Trio Ariana, and revised by the composer for the Talisker Players. Elizabeth Raum has set other, more serious, texts by the Saskatchewan poet John V. Hicks (such as First & Gracious Sight, performed in the Talisker Players’ 2002-2003 season). Renovated Rhymes matches Hicks’ ironically imaginative elaborations on seven traditional nursery rhymes with musical settings which reflect the tone of the texts exactly. A wealth of onomatopoeic effects - meowing, fiddling, sighing wind, ticking clocks, bleating sheep - underlines the concrete imagery of the verses, while sly melodic quotations from the tunes of the "original" nursery rhymes help to draw tight the referential circle of the whole artistic enterprise. In the final movement, a pseudo-archaic dance setting of "Four and Twenty Blackbirds", the singer’s role is further complicated by multi-tasking.

Malcolm Forsyth (b. 1936) - The Dong with a Luminous Nose, for baritone, viola and piano (1979)
Edward Lear is one of the best-known writers of nonsense verse in the English language - a nineteenth-century pioneer of the genre, in fact - but some critics have seen reflected in his nonsense a deep alienation from Victorian social and cultural traditions and assumptions. Composer Malcolm Forsyth has set The Dong with a Luminous Nose as a grand satirical melodrama, allowing dissonant sonorities and abrupt rhythmic shifts to underline the dark side of this incongruous mock-romance between the tragically faithful individualist of the title and the complaisant but socially conditioned object of his doomed affections. Forsyth was much influenced by the grandiose recorded reading given the piece by the English actor Stanley Holloway, and incorporated many of his inflections and his odd little tune for the "Chorus of Jumblies". The song was composed for, and first performed by, Maureen Forrester.

Alex Eddington (b. 1980) - Eight Poems of Dennis Lee, for soprano and string quartet (2002)
Written as a graduation gift for soprano Kristin Mueller, this seamless set of songs pairs favourite children’s verses by one of Canada’s best known poets with witty, tongue-in-cheek string accompaniments quirkily reminiscent of such composers as Weill and Gershwin - and even Berio. The composer writes:

Think of this cycle as a loosely unified variety show put on by eight different children, or one child with a particularly active, even spastic, imagination and a hamper full of grown-up clothes. After all, mood swings and near-hallucinatory imaginings – things that we as adults label as improper, or even insane, and try our hardest to suppress – are an everyday part of the life of a child.

In fact, the cycle is constructed rather like a day in the life of such a child, from the hyperactive morning introduction of "Goofus" and the loopy inconsequentiality of the first few songs, through the high drama of "Mrs. Murphy" and "Alligator Pie", until the over-wound gyroscope finally topples in "Rock Me Easy".

Andrew Ager (b. 1962) - Five Bagatelles, for baritone, horn and string quartet (2004)
Andrew Ager is no stranger to Talisker audiences - recent seasons have featured his Magnificat and Ellis Portal. The seamless set of bagatelles on this evening’s programme presents the composer in another mood entirely; it consists of settings of verses by five different writers, three of them - the verses, that is - in limerick form, and the remaining two more substantial (although to characterize them as narratives would, perhaps, be an exaggeration). The piece is a reworking of a set of short pieces for choir, commissioned for the fall convocation at Dalhousie University in 1993, about which the Convenor was overheard to remark that they were "somewhat unedifying". The work unfolds much like a dance-suite, with frequent alternations of metre, tempo, and affect, until the slithering chromatic figure of the opening returns to set the final two lines, underlining their summative significance: "In square black boots / The cabman dances". The audience might also like to meditate on the enigmatic epigram which the composer has inscribed above the title of the work: "He not only overfloweth with learning; he standeth in the slops".

Christopher Berg (b. 1949) - Don't let that horse, for baritone and violin (1996)
Berg studied piano at the Manhattan School of Music, but describes himself as a self-taught composer. While his output includes a Mass and the opera Cymbeline, he is known primarily as a composer of songs, with a particular affinity for perfectly-crafted miniatures, surrealism, and absurdism. His setting of the short lyric Don’t let that horse, from the American poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s A Coney Island of the Mind, was commissioned by the New York chamber ensemble Mirror Visions, and is a perfect example of Berg’s aesthetic proclivities: the solo violin portrays both itself and the horse of the title, and provides a "frame" for the Chagall painting and the singer’s peculiar narrative. Like the text, the music moves from self-conscious convolution to the punning banality of the conclusion - all in less than three minutes.

Seymour Barab (b. 1921) - A Little Light Music, for soprano, baritone, cello and piano (1998)
The American composer Seymour Barab is known primarily for his more than 30 short operas - such as Chanticleer, A Game of Chance, Little Red Riding Hood and The Toy Shop - many of them for young or amateur performers. He also enjoyed a twenty-year career as a professional orchestral cellist and viola da gamba player, with particular interests in both new music and early music. A Little Light Music consists of settings of his own humorous verses, for the most part retellings of jokes venerable enough to have achieved "chestnut" status, with a finale which revels in the onomatopoeic possibilities of a Latin band. This set of songs was originally conceived for a single singer, but the Talisker Players, recognising the rich rhetorical possibilities in the musical and textual materials (so characteristic of Barab’s oeuvre), have expanded the performing forces to include an element of dialogue.Berg studied piano at the Manhattan School of Music, but describes himself as a self-taught composer. While his output includes a Mass and the opera Cymbeline, he is known primarily as a composer of songs, with a particular affinity for perfectly-crafted miniatures, surrealism, and absurdism. His setting of the short lyric Don’t let that horse, from the American poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s A Coney Island of the Mind, was commissioned by the New York chamber ensemble Mirror Visions, and is a perfect example of Berg’s aesthetic proclivities: the solo violin portrays both itself and the horse of the title, and provides a "frame" for the Chagall painting and the singer’s peculiar narrative. Like the text, the music moves from self-conscious convolution to the punning banality of the conclusion - all in less than three minutes.

Robert Jordahl (b. 1926) - Verses from Ogden Nash, for tenor, horn and piano (1994)
Verses from Ogden Nash was chosen as one of the works to represent the very varied output of American composer Robert Jordahl in a concert to mark his retirement from McNeese State University in 1999, after 31 years of teaching - the only humorous piece, it would seem, on an otherwise highly respectable programme. Closer examination, however, reveals it to be a mature and reflective work, outlining the four ages of man. An insouciant tango presents the poet in his youthful courting phase; the second movement, more darkly and urgently rhythmic, portrays the cares and frustrations of parenthood, but reveals them through the voice of a child. The third and final song alternates between calmly objective sections featuring voice and piano alone, in which the poet compares himself with poets and artists of previous generations, and more active passages in which he waxes philosophical about those attachments which transcend human relationships; in these, the horn accompaniment seems to fulfill the role of subjective experience.

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