Artistic representations of the Garden of Eden usually depict its lost innocence by means of the placid co-existence of a multiplicity of animal species (including our own). Somehow images of lush vegetation seem to work less powerfully on the human imagination than do those of our more sentient fellow beings! The Talisker Players have followed this worthy precedent in assembling a musical bestiary for this evening’s programme, a collection of works which includes images of birds, mammals (both terrestrial and marine), amphibians, mollusks, crustaceans, insects, and fish. All the works are by twentieth- and twenty-first- century composers, but the musical styles are almost as diverse as the animals themselves: from Poulenc’s astringent Parisian neo-classicism to the semi-aleatoric colour effects of Lukas Foss, and bearing the imprint of such influences as classicism, romanticism, atonality, and impressionism, as well as modernism and post-modernism. With the exception of Shakespeare’s Aviary, the composers have set texts by poets who are or were their near contemporaries, and the poets’ attitudes to their subjects range from the close observation of Jeffery Beam or Elizabeth Bishop, for whom the imagined interior life of the species depicted becomes the “text”, to the detachment of Shakespeare or Apollinaire, who use the animals as a “pretext” to say something about our own life as humans.

Lukas Foss (1922- ) – Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird for voice, flute, piano and percussion (1978)
The German-born American composer Lukas Foss studied piano, flute, theory, composition, orchestration, and conducting from an early age; by the time he was 20, his teachers had included Louis Moyse, Fritz Reiner, Isabelle Vengerova, Paul Hindemith, and Serge Koussevitzky. His compositions include works for stage, orchestra, chamber, chorus, voice, and piano, and his distinguished career has included conducting appointments with the Buffalo Philharmonic, the Brooklyn Philharmonic, the Jerusalem Symphony Orchestra, and the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra, and teaching appointments at UCLA, Tanglewood, Carnegie Mellon University, Harvard University, the Manhattan School of Music, Yale University, and Boston University. A two-week festival of his music was held in Buffalo in 2003.

Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird is, in many ways, highly characteristic of Foss’ compositional style. The solo voice presents Wallace Stevens’ poetry, in thirteen brief, almost fragmentary movements, combining soaring phrases with hushed whispering, and a tape delay echoes the effects of the voice three seconds later. The flute conveys the many moods of the poems and the many manifestations of the blackbird, using a variety of extended techniques. The piano – its lid removed – and the percussion combine to produce an extraordinary range of mysterious and atmospheric effects, using such devices as triangle beaters, cowbells, and Japanese bowls directly on the piano strings, thus creating an ideal framework for the allusive, even gnomic text.

Lee Hoiby (1926- ) – Rainforest for voice, wind quintet, and piano (1969)
Lee Hoiby, born in Wisconsin, originally planned a career as a concert pianist, but changed his mind when he was invited to study composition with Gian Carlo Menotti at the Curtis Institute. Menotti’s influence led Hoiby in the direction of opera, and his dramatic works have been presented by the Spoleto Festival, the New York City Opera, the Des Moines Metro Opera, the Dallas Opera, and Pacific Opera Victoria in British Columbia, as well as on and off Broadway; he has just completed work on an operatic setting of Romeo and Juliet.

Hoiby's songs, many of them settings of texts by distinguished American poets, are widely performed. Hoiby’s set of songs entitled Rainy Season, Sub-tropics, based on poems of Elizabeth Bishop, dates from 1969. It was re-introduced, with the addition of a fourth movement, as Rainforest, at the 1996 Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival, where Hoiby was composer-in-residence; this evening’s programme, however, presents the work in its original form. The three poems, “Giant Toad”, “Strayed Crab”, and “Giant Snail” are cross-referenced miniatures, interior monologues of three unusual animals close to one another on a rainy night. Bishop spent roughly twenty years in Brazil, and these poems – minutely observed, but suffused with alienation – reflect her ambivalence about her experiential intimacy with a country which never became her home. Hoiby’s rich palette of instrumental colour creates the rainforest world – dark, complex, and mysteriouly alive – in which the three unlikely protagonists declaim their stream-of-consciousness reflections; the highly chromatic arioso style of the vocal part conveys both a physical portrait of the animal narrators and the interior affect of each poem.

Lee Hoiby – The Life of the Bee for voice, cello, and piano (2001)
Lee Hoiby’s song cycle The Life of the Bee was premiered at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill on April 6, 2002. This cycle consists of five songs with texts by Jeffrey Beam, drawn from a larger work-in-progress of the same name; the poems characterize the various residents and activities of a bee hive. The first movement, “Millennium Approaches”, is brief elegy to the spent blossoms which the bees have used to maintain themselves and their world: the gently undulating descending lines in the cello and piano frame the spare and allusive text. “The Spirit of the Hive”, with its darting and buzzing sixteenth-note figures in the instrumental parts, speaks of the irresistible call of wildflowers to the bees of the hive, and “The Queen” portrays the fierce self-identification of an ancient queen bee with her expanding kingdom.

The sharp, march-like rhythms of “The Sting” underline the defiant challenge of the worker bees provide to anyone who would threaten the hive. “The Swarm” evokes the exultant power of a bee swarm as it bursts forth to seek for blossoms and fruit, propelled by racing sextuplets in the accompaniment. The final phrase “This a thing, some will say, men will not do” epitomises the singularity of the species, and Hoiby sets it lightly, quoting the instrumental figures which opened the cycle. His setting throughout the cycle demonstrates the craft of using music to enhance a text without overwhelming or distorting it, and provides an apt vehicle for Beam’s short, precise phrases and arresting natural images.

Euphrosyne Keefer (1919-2003) – The Osprey for voice and string quartet (1980)
English-born Euphrosyne Keefer studied composition, piano, and viola at the Royal Academy of Music in London, and was accepted as a vocal soloist with the Sadlers Wells Opera, but she then married a Canadian mining engineer and raised a family in the Canadian north. From 1963 to 1977 she composed and taught piano and theory in Toronto. Her influences included Bartók, Hindemith, Stravinsky, and Sibelius; early ventures into serial composition were succeeded by a more melodic style of linear writing.

Keefer’s work includes numerous song cycles, choral works, and keyboard pieces. The Osprey is a through-composed setting of four nature lyrics by the Canadian poet E.J. Pratt. The second and fourth texts, “The Sea-Cathedral” and “The Sea-Shell”, are classically stylized meditations on the beauty and wonder of nature, with strict metre and rhyme-schemes, while the first and third, “The Osprey” and “Sea-Gulls”, depict the unpredictable flight of birds, treating metre and rhyme with correspondingly greater freedom. Keefer’s setting echoes this distinction to some extent, but the rhythm throughout is extremely complex and fluid, giving the text the greatest possible flexibility, and recalling the inexorable but elusive patterns of sea-wave and ocean current: metre shifts from one measure to the next, and a web of superimposed duplet, triplet, and even septuplet beat-subdivisions conveys the fractal complexities of wind, water, and flight. The voice is set, for the most part, in independent lines “against” the string quartet, which functions as a self-contained unit in accompanied solos, duets, four-part counterpoint, and forceful homorhythmic passages.

Francis Poulenc (1899-1963) – Le bestiaire for voice, string quartet, flute, clarinet and bassoon (1919)
This group of songs on short, almost epigrammatic texts by Guillaume Apollinaire was Poulenc’s first venture in the song-cycle form. It was written during his early student years in Paris, when he was one of a group of young composers called “Les nouveaux jeunes”, the most prominent of whom later came to be known as “Les Six”; the piece is dedicated to Louis Durey, another member of this group. The style of this early work is typical of the spirit of Les Six (and their inadvertent mentor Satie); the apparent diatonic simplicity of each separate part serves to convey the poet’s genuine reflections, but the acerbic discord of the whole ensures that no tonality is ever entirely committed to, and a certain detachment is preserved. The string quartet and woodwind trio function in almost stereotypical ways, the former providing the formal continuity and coherence of each short movement, and the latter offering skittish bursts of colour and rhythmic activity in response to the deceptively straightforward vocal part.

For all their brevity and transparency, these are sophisticated texts, and the young composer’s settings present them sympathetically as well as picturesquely. “Le dromadaire” (The dromedary) alludes to an almost unknown anecdote from Portuguese historical chronicle to depict the poet’s longing to transcend his circumstances; “La chèvre du Thibet” (The Tibetan goat) draws a connection between the beauty of the exotic and that of the beloved, with a clever reference to classical mythology, all in nine measures. Biblical allusion in “La sauterelle” (The grasshopper) conveys a curious combination of poetic modesty and aspiration, while “Le dauphin” (The dolphin) expresses a fundamental pessimism, albeit with a light touch. To the crayfish of “L’écrevisse” Apollinaire attributes his own existential uncertainties and doubts, while the great shadow-dwelling fish of “La carpe” becomes a symbol of long, melancholy old age: Poulenc frames the four lines of text with an inexorable clock-like accompaniment. It is worth noting that twenty years later Poulenc said of these songs: “To sing Le Bestiaire with irony is a complete nonsense. That is to fail to understand either the poetry of Apollinaire or my music”.

Alexander Rapoport (1957- ) – Shakespeare’s Aviary for voice, clarinet, viola, and piano
Toronto composer Alexander Rapoport came to Canada from the U.S. as a child in 1970. He studied composition at the Hochschule für Music und darstellende Kunst in Vienna, and at the University of Toronto, where he completed a doctorate in 1991, and where he now teaches. Rapoport has received commissions for chamber, vocal and orchestral music, musical comedy, and incidental music for theatre and film. The Talisker Players performed his Northscapes in 2001 and his Chicago Portraits in 2002.

Of Shakespeare’s Aviary, the composer writes:

The imagery and language of English verse are so often so rich that the composer must struggle to find a justification for setting a poem: why not simply read it? …I chose the easy way: I looked for poems that were intended to be sung. I was immediately attracted to song texts in Shakespeare's plays… all I needed was a unifying concept, and I hit upon birds. This gave me the two songs from Love's Labours Lost that frame the cycle and “Hark! Hark! the Lark” from Cymbeline. I added Marcellus's lines about the cock crying at night from Hamlet, even though they were not intended as a song text, because of the beauty and simplicity of the image.