Façade
The sounds and rhythms of words at play
Tuesday May 3 & Wednesday May 4, 2011 • 8pm.
Pre-Concert talks at 7:15pm
Programme notes
by Andrea Budgey
ALEX EDDINGTON: Poems of Dennis Lee
HARRY FREEDMAN: Pan
ALEXANDER RAPOPORT: Jabberwocky, text by Lewis Carroll and Alexander Rapoport
WILLIAM WALTON: Façade, text by Edith Sitwell
The human brain looks for patterns, for sense, for narrative. All the works on this evening's programme are, in one way or another, a response to that tendency, and a challenge to it, offering tantalizing glimpses of coherence, and invitations to construct meaning, before whisking the listener on to new and incongruous allusions and juxtapositions. Three of the featured works are in English – or at least use English words and structures; in these the incongruities have to do with the frustration of linguistic anticipation, and the music reinforces this effect. In Freedman's Pan, the text is composed of words, euphoniously combined, from various First Nations languages; no meaning is even suggested, and it is the dramatic interactions of the performers which hint (deceptively) at a story to be discerned. Curiously, our response to such cleverness, such deviousness, and such deliberate betrayal of our expectations is not resentment, but, rather, to be entertained!
Alex Eddington (b.1980): 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... 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.
The three excerpts from the cycle presented on this programme are rather like moments from the life of such a child, moving from the hyperactive rhythmic shifts of “Goofus” and the loopy, inconsequential waltz of “Can You Canoe?”, to the high drama and forward momentum of the classic “Alligator Pie”.
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Harry Freedman (1922-2005): Pan, for soprano, flute, and piano (1972)
This work of comic chamber-music theatre was written for the Lyric Trio, whose members were soprano Mary Morrison, the composer’s wife, and flutist Robert Aitken and pianist Marion Ross, another musical couple. Pan requires the performers to employ a variety of “extended” techniques – clapping, foot-stamping, speaking, whispering, tongue-clicking, singing or playing into the open strings of the piano, or plucking or striking them, flutter-tonguing, and key-slaps – and to move, gesture, and interact in ways which convey stylized emotional states and complicated interpersonal relationships. The “stage directions” can be very explicit:
All look at each other as though they've been caught being naughty. Then, after briefly straightening ties and clearing throats... Piano and flute both look at soprano disapprovingly. Then turn page with great dignity and continue...
Freedman employs an eclectic stylistic palette, suggesting jazz, blues, rock, samba, and flamenco. The text is composed of words drawn from North American Aboriginal languages, chosen for their aural effect rather than for their actual meaning, and this lexical opacity reinforces the impression of absurdist impenetrability created by the theatrical elements.
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Alexander Rapoport (b.1957): Jabberwocky for tenor, trumpet, viola, tenor saxophone, and piano (2011)
The nonsense ballad “Jabberwocky”, in Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass, has inspired numerous mock-serious studies, as well as clever translations into other languages. Rapoport's new chamber work seems motivated by both these impulses: it expands and elaborates the text, in the context of translation into a new medium. The extended introduction “explains” the text, largely in the words of Humpty Dumpty to Alice, with vivid accompaniment and interjection by the instrumental ensemble; the setting of “Jabberwocky” itself moves from a restrained, if slightly twisted, ballad-style presentation to a high mock-heroic climax.
Rapoport includes oblique (and not-so-oblique) musical quotations: the traditional Manx song, “Ellan Vannin”, for example, accompanies the definition of “manxome”, and references to Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen enliven the epic combat with the Jabberwock. The singer is instructed to perform “with the air of a sad clown” or “with the air of a patient school master”, and given occasional stage directions. As the metre, grammar, and syntax of the text encourage the reader to wrest meaning from the invented vocabulary, the musical setting, with its references to a broader musical language, creates an impression of more comprehensive – but entirely humorous – meaning.
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William Walton (1902-1983): Façade: An Entertainment, for reciters and instrumental ensemble (1922-1978)
Façade was Walton's first major work, one which grew out of his close relationship with the extraordinary and eccentric Sitwell siblings: Edith, Osbert, and Sacheverell. Walton met the brothers while he was a student at Oxford, and when he left Oxford for London in early 1919, they invited him to lodge with them. The arrangement eventually lasted fifteen years, during which time the Sitwells introduced their protégé to the brightest lights of London society and culture, and did their utmost to advance his career.
Edith Sitwell, by this time, had been publishing poetry, and experimenting with a technique which she described as “transcendental”, one which focused almost entirely on the sound of words, and on the effect of subtle differentiations in rhyme, assonance, rhythm, and speed. Comparisons to music were irresistible, and the family decided that their young lodger should collaborate with Edith on a setting of some of her verses. He chose an ensemble which evoked the colourful texture of a popular dance-band, and after a process which involved intense and detailed analysis of the texts, the first performance was given at the Sitwell home in January, 1922, with the performers concealed behind a painted curtain, and the recitation emerging from it by means of a specialized megaphone.
This, and the first public performance a year and a half later, initially met with mixed response, although the poetry was acknowledged to be clever, and Walton's music was generally admired. Façade underwent numerous revisions and re-orderings over the next three decades; Walton set additional verses, and occasionally Sitwell produced new texts to fit original music. The manner of their collaboration underlines how “musically” the texts were conceived: the apparent normalcy of grammar and syntax tempts the listener to look for meaning and narrative, but this search is constantly frustrated – it is always sound which matters most, and the extraordinary visual images which flit past the imagination are a mere by-product. Walton's music, with its clear evocations of recognizable genres, might almost be said to have clearer and more coherent “meaning” than the text.
A definitive edition of Façade was published in 1951, and Walton's 75th birthday celebrations in 1977 produced two new versions, making available movements which had been omitted earlier. This evening's selection has been made from among the full spectrum of published movements, and uses two reciters, as Sitwell and Walton came to prefer.
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