Sailing Alone From Song to Song

I was going wherever I happened to go,
giving myself over to whatever I met,
-Su Tung-P'o

How easy he has made it for me to enter here,
to sit down in a corner;
cross my legs like his, and listen.
-Billy Collins

One evening, in the manner of Su Tung-P'o, I followed the path of composer Missy Mazzoli to New Amsterdam Records, where a new CD of her music was on offer.  From there I spotted a trio called janus, with a first CD just out.  The trio intrigued me because of its instrumentation:  flute, viola, and harp.

Debussy was the first to compose for this set of instruments.  He’d planned six sonatas for diverse instruments, after Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos.  He completed only three, one of which, lucky for us, was the Sonata for Flute, Viola, and Harp.

Many composers since have followed Debussy’s lead, including Arnold Bax in 1916 and Toru Takemitsu in 1992.  Now janus, a three-woman ensemble based in Brooklyn, New York, has released a CD entitled i am not, featuring work by composers Jason Treuting, Caleb Burhans, Angélica Negrón, Anna Clyne, Cameron Britt, and Ryan Brown.  The music is engaging and cleverly anchored by four Treuting pieces that give the album its name.

The first composition, i, employs a series of statements, each offering a different answer to the what of i am not.  The vocals are simple spoken phrases like "I'm not awake" accompanied by sustained, single notes on the flute and plucked phrases on the viola and harp.  By means of these simple gestures, the piece gives full expression to the complexity of daily life.

The album itself is a tour de force of composition, with each piece complementing the others to create a mesmerizing whole.  No special knowledge is required to enter:  the CD provides a cornucopia of fascinating listening for all.

I didn’t rest at janus, but, in the manner of Su Tung-P'o, I sailed onward, ready to give myself over to whatever I met.  I’d recently heard the janus harpist, Nuiko Wadden, perform with the much-lauded International Contemporary Ensemble, so I decided to follow her path next.

I was well rewarded, for Wadden led me to the Billy Collins Suite.  Collins is an American poet who served as Poet Laureate of the United States from 2001-2003.  Though highly regarded by many, I've learned there are some who consider him lightweight.

Introduction to Poetry, set to music by Stacy Garrop, seems to me to speak directly to that concern.  The poem starts on an inviting, hopeful note:

I ask them to take a poem
and hold it up to the light
like a color slide

The ending, though, is dark:

But all they want to do
is tie the poem to a chair with a rope
and torture a confession out of it.

They begin beating it with a hose
to find out what it really means.

As I listened to the other pieces in the Suite, I tried to take Collins’ admonishment to heart.  I’ll confess I found a couple of the poems either light entertainment (Sonnet) or downright silly (The Willies).  I wondered why a composer would bother to set them at all, but then I remembered what composer John Metcalf had said:

I had no such doubts about the poem to which Wadden led me, though.  She played harp in an elegant setting by Zhou Tian of Reading an Anthology of Chinese Poems of the Sung Dynasty, I Pause To Admire the Length and Clarity of Their Titles.  Collins' meditation on classical Chinese poetry begins:

It seems these poets have nothing
up their ample sleeves
they turn over so many cards so early,
telling us before the first line
whether it is wet or dry,
night or day, the season the man is standing in,
even how much he has had to drink.

As I read, I thought back to images of classical Chinese art:  graceful evocations of the natural world, a scholar sitting by a waterfall.  I realized that, apart from poetry that accompanied the art, I’d read none of the poetry from that time at all.

I sailed out the door to a bookstore, in hopes that this deficit could soon be filled.  Only one slim book stood on the shelves, but the bookseller, alert to the possibility of another, retrieved from the basement a more substantial tome.  Then I thought, well, I’ve not read any Billy Collins, either, and that too should be cured.  I searched eagerly, in hope of finding a volume containing Reading an Anthology, and there it was:  Sailing Alone Around the Room.

Home again, my new books by my side, I replayed the Suite's setting of Reading an Anthology.  The poem is rich in associations, but even so, the music multiplied the poem’s effect.  I listened more intently to discover how:  maybe the way the flute bends a note at the end of a phrase, I thought.  Or the way the viola glides in to echo the melody, perhaps that’s it.  Or maybe it’s the silvered shimmer of the harp before the narrator reads a line.

I realized, as I listened, that I’d sailed back to where I’d begun:  the instrumentation Zhou Tian had chosen was none other than Debussy’s ethereal trio of viola, flute, and harp.

***

For a related article, on musical settings of poems that explores Ned Rorem settings of Wallace Stevens poems, see Raining Acorn's piece, "The Song as the Thing Itself," at The Bricoleur.

The image at the head of the post is of the poem and painting Auspicious Cranes, Emperor Huizong, Northern Song Dynasty.  The painting in the body of the post is Scholar by a Waterfall, Ma Yuan, Southern Song Dynasty.  The photograph of janus is provided as part of its press packet; the photograph of Billy Collins is provided through wikimedia commons.

The quotations at the head of the post are from Midsummer Festival, Wandering Up As Far As The Monastery, Su Tung-P'o, Song Dynasty, in the Anthology Classical Chinese Poetry, translated and edited by David Hinton, and Reading an Anthology of Chinese Poems of the Sung Dynasty, I Pause To Admire the Length and Clarity of Their Titles, Billy Collins, in the book Sailing Alone Around the Room, New and Selected Poems.

Listening List

janus playing Caleb Burhans' Keymaster from i am not:



To hear other tracks from i am not, click here, click on a track, and play at lower left.

For short clips from the Billy Collins Suite, click here.

Debussy's Sonata for Flute, Viola, and Harp (Pastorale):



Arnold Bax, Elegiac Trio



For an excerpt from Toru Takemitsu's And Then I Knew 'Twas Wind (poem by Emily Dickinson), click here.