Stephen Brown: Where the Geese Go Barefoot
George Crumb: Federico's Little Songs for Children
John Greer: Palm Court Songs of the Bubble Ring
Zae Mun: What's for Supper?
Elizabeth Raum: Renovated Rhymes

A concert programme presenting children's rhymes and nonsense verse for an audience of adults does so, of necessity, with a backward gaze. It is almost impossible to be objective about the formative experiences of childhood, but the selectiveness of memory does not permit us to be fully subjective either. Childhood becomes, for most adults, a place where they were themselves different, where fantasy and reality and whimsy and desire all operated on other planes, and where doing Nothing, as Pooh would have it, could be fully absorbing. This “enchanted place on the top of the Forest” becomes accessible to us only through recollection, and story, and the stubborn certainty that it existed and made us who we are. In The House at Pooh Corner, Christopher Robin has a very lucid understanding that things will be different when he goes away to boarding school, and he confides the reality of his childhood experience for safe-keeping to the friend who has shared it. The book ends:

So they went off together. But wherever they go, and whatever happens to them on the way, in that enchanted place on the top of the Forest a little boy and his Bear will always be playing.

In the songs and readings of this evening's programme we search for that place, using a variety of maps and lenses, finding sometimes that the roads have changed, and that the images are strangely refracted, but never doubting that we would know it if we arrived there.

Stephen Brown (1948- ): Where the Geese Go Barefoot (1999, revised 2008), for voice, flute, viola, and guitar.

English-born and Canadian-educated, Stephen Brown has taught at the Victoria Conservatory of Music since 1993, and since 1996 has been head of the theory and composition department. The cycle Where the Geese Go Barefoot, based on Mother Goose rhymes which the composer's mother read to him in childhood, was originally written for performance in the Victoria faculty chamber music series in 1999, and revised for this evening's programme. The first, third, and fifth movements, “Peter Piper”, “She Sells Sea Shells”, and “Betty Botter”, set three traditional tongue-twisters as challenges for the singer, with rapid-fire texts in the fast movements and curious melodic leaps (beginning wide and collapsing inward by semitones) in the slower song. The remaining two movements, “I See the Moon”, and “Donkey, Donkey, Old and Grey” are set as instrumental duets, one for flute and guitar, and the other for viola and guitar, evoking the familiar texts of the nursery rhymes rather than presenting them explicitly.

George Crumb (1929- ): Federico's Little Songs for Children (1986), for voice, flute, and harp

Having set many poems of Federico Garcia Lorca, culminating in Ancient Voices of Children in 1970, American composer George Crumb turned his attention to the work of other poets. After sixteen years, however, the Canciones para niños, with their light-hearted depiction of aspects of a child's fantasy world, drew him back. The composer describes the cycle in detail:

The opening song, “Señorita of the Fan” (Vivace, giocosamente, scored with piccolo), is set for the most part in a quintuple measure. The reference to "crickets" is illustrated by a chirping piccolo motif. “Afternoon” (Andantino quasi barcarola, with flute in C) is delicate and idyllic throughout. “A Song Sung” (Molto moderato, poco bizarramente, with alto flute) is set in a very capricious style. The alto flute personifies Lorca's "Griffon bird". The central song of the cycle, “Snail” (Lento, languidamente, with bass flute), projects a sense of timelessness and wonder. The soprano whispers the opening and concluding lines of the poem; for the central portion, the soprano sings in “Sprechstimme style”, combined with a highly coloristic use of the harp. In “The Lizard is Crying!” (Lentamente e lamentoso, with alto flute), the singer alternates between a quasi-cadenza style of declamation and rhythmically articulated spoken passages. The alto flute participates in the general sobbing! “A Little Song from Seville” (Tempo di Habanera, scherzando, un poco buffo, with flute in C) parodies a well-known type of Spanish popular music (and contains references to Debussy's La Puerta del Vino). The concluding piece, “Silly Song” (Prestissimo and alternately molto più lento, with piccolo), is . . . just a silly song!

John Greer (1954- ): Palm Court Songs of the Bubble Ring (opus 10), for voice, clarinet, cello, and piano

Canadian composer John Greer is also an active conductor, accompanist, vocal coach and arranger, as well as the director and chair of opera studies at the New England Conservatory in Boston. He is known internationally for his numerous vocal, choral, and dramatic works (including the highly successful children's opera The Snow Queen), and his output of vocal chamber music includes a number of highly entertaining song-cycles commissioned by prominent Canadian musicians.

The kaleidoscopic cycle Palm Court Songs of the Bubble Ring was commissioned by Greta Kraus, as the result of a Toronto Arts Award, and first performed by Mark Dubois and Amici in 1991. The texts, by Dennis Lee, include some sheer nonsense, like “The Man who Never Was”, which allows Greer to indulge in swing and cakewalk variations on a Mozart theme; “Mr. Green and Ms. Levine”, which nods in Schubert's general direction; and the mad scherzo – with foxtrot – of “The Mermaid's Banquet”. Other movements are clearly intended to be heard by adults: the political jab (still topical!) of “When I went up to Ottawa”; the dark ending of the Fauré hommage “The Coat”; and the ominous social commentary of “The Golden Rule”. The cycle's whole orientation to childhood is perhaps best expressed in the words of the title song, which traces the way in which the irridescent bubble-rings of a child's play leave traces in adult consciousness.

Zae Munn (1953- ): What's for Supper? (1998), for voice, viola, and piano

Zae Munn has taught composition and theory at Saint Mary's College in South Bend, Indiana, since 1990, after early musical training in cello, piano, voice, and conducting, and composition studies at the University of Illinois and Chicago Musical College. The three songs of What's for Supper? were commissioned by soprano Deborah Norin-Kuehn in part for school performances, in order to teach children about and interest them in styles of contemporary art music, but they were also intended for use in traditional recital settings, where adult audiences appreciate the relationships of music and text, and are conversant with references to the art music tradition. The texts were commissioned from Peg Lauber, and bring together elements of children's real-life concerns and the worlds of fantasy, story, and whimsy. The title song, “What's for Supper?”, the longest and most complicated of the set, involves the pianist and violist as speakers, and even calls on them to sing, while negotiating rapidly alternating metres and tempos.

Elizabeth Raum (1945- ): Renovated Rhymes (1999), for voice, viola, and piano

Aside from her busy schedule as a composer, Elizabeth Raum continues her performing career, as the principal oboist of the Regina Symphony Orchestra. The song-cycle Renovated Rhymes 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: playing a tambourine part which weaves in and out of the vocal sections!