The song cycle A HEARTLAND PORTRAIT for Baritone and Piano was commissioned by Linda and Jack Hoeschler to celebrate their 40th wedding anniversary and for baritone, Thomas Hampson who premiered it with Wolfram Rieger on January 17, 2006. The premiere was given at the Ordway Music Theatre on a Schubert Club International Artists Series program. At that time only four songs existed - numbers 1, 2, 3 and 5. Time didn't permit my completing the entire cycle in time for the Schubert Club premiere so Thomas Hampson sang those four songs. I explained that I had planned on adding three more. The day after the premiere Tom called me and said that he thought the cycle needed only one more song to really be complete. So I set one more poem - "Porch Swing in September." It seemed to fit in the #4 slot and the original #4 then became #5, thereby retaining the closing position in the cycle.
Ted Kooser, the poet for this cycle, is the recent Poet Laureate from the U.S. He lives in Nebraska and I found his wonderful poems to be both straightforward in that "midwestern" way and also quite dark and layered with various meanings. In the first song "Flying at Night" is tried to retain some mystery by using oscillating tritone figures with fast-moving runs interlaced. The second song - "At Midnight" ventures into more agitation with alternating octaves and staccato chords. The mixed meter keeps things off balance. "An August Night" - #3, opens with a high, lyrical melody that descends slowly in a seductive fashion. There is a slight bluesy reference in a couple of spots. "Porch Swing in September" (#4) is a complete contrast with rollicking octaves and chords that attempt to word paint, quite literally, the movement of the porch swing. The last song, "A Summer Night" is flavored with chords that suggest nostalgia, a backward glance or reflective look. Throughout the cycle I have tried to make the words audible and highlighted. The accompaniment can at times be surging and ecstatic, but at other times it is very spare. I hope that I have added a musical dimension to the meaning behind the words by making the listener pause to analyze the thoughts and images that the singer and pianist are projecting. Hopefully, all of this may cause us to reflect on "how simple, how perfect it seems." - Stephen Paulus
The texts of Night are poetic statements raising questions concerning the silence of God in the face of human suffering. They outline a progression from silence of God (“To one kneeling down no word came”); to the indifference of God (“who, so they heard, wanted all this/ who, so they heard, witnessed all this”); the void without God (“Blessèd art Thou, No One”); and ultimately moving beyond the silence / indifference / void to another level of understanding, at the same time simpler and more complex (“to abide with my creator, God, / and sleep as I in childhood sweetly slept”).
The title of the set as a whole makes reference both to the noche oscura (dark night [of the soul]) of St. John of the Cross, and Elie Wiesel’s Auschwitz memoir (also entitled Night). I have used this unusual juxtaposition of poems by Paul Celan (a Rumanian Holocaust survivor), R.S. Thomas (an Anglican priest) and John Clare (a nineteenth century English existentialist) in order to best pose these questions, The very fact that the poems intentionally do not “flow” as a narrative emphasizes the poems’ difficulties. Nevertheless there is a path from the state of mind first introduced in Thomas’ poem to the dream visions of Celan and Clare. This is the camino de la necagión, the negative way” towards the Divine, towards aseitas: the knowledge of God as existence itself.
In the instrumental setting for these poems, I have chosen textures that seemed most appropriate for these highly intimate visions, hopefully establishing a kind of silence into which the poetry can enter. I have used a cycle of key centers (centering around a primary key framed in thirds) and melodic material (the linear shapes also turn in on themselves) that both underline a “centering” motion that is intended to enhance the texts. -- Jeffrey Wood, November 1999
My Four Deadly Serious Songs were of course inspired, at least insofar as the title was concerned, by Johannes Brahms' Vier Ernste Gesänge [Four Serious Songs]. By no stretch of the imagination was my intent to satirize Brahms or to ridicule the idea of "serious songs": in fact, I consider each of these songs to be concerned with fundamentally very serious subjects (i.e., Life, Love, Death, the Universe and so on). However they are, ultimately, subjects which, for all their seriousness, one ?nds difficult to remain properly somber about for any great length of time.
The three songs presented here use texts that are in the spirit of this kind of "deadly seriousness": Stephen Crane's "A man said to the universe," as ?ne a statement on existentialism as one could wish for; W. H. Auden's "Master and Boatswain," which speaks with a deep and poignant directness about the human condition; and Ted Hughes' "The Telephone," a most powerful indictment of the many and varied telephones in all our lives. --Jeffrey Wood
JESSE GIVENS Private First Class, U.S. Army, drowned in the Eu[phrates River on May 1, 2003, in the service of his country, in his 34th year. He wrote a letter to his wife, Melissa; five-year-old son, Dakota, nicknamed “Toad”; and his unborn child, Carson, nicknamed “Bean”. He asked Melissa not to open the envelope unless he was killed. “Please, only read if it I don’t come home,” he wrote. “Please put it away and hopefully you will never have to read it.” This song, (originally titled “Private First Class Jesse Givens”) was premiered on September 17, 2006 at the University of Wisconsin Madison by Andrew Garland with the composer at the piano.
Folk songs are passed down through the generations by people singing them to one another. Along the way, each party uses artistic license to embellish a song at their whim, thereby making it their own. Words and melody are continuously altered; on shipboard, around campfires, in saloons and whorehouses, on cattle drives, in cotton fields and just about everywhere else that there is a shared human experience. By the time the scribes track down and notate these songs for posterity, they are privy to only the latest incarnations, sometimes having to piece together chunks from different sources to construct one coherent song.
Like the "folks" who came before me, I indulged my own sensibilities regarding the material, knowing that certain liberties would have to be taken to transform unaccompanied melodies into arrangements suitable for performance. A word might be modified (or even inserted) to create a smoother line. Meter changes where occasionally used to extend words or phrases. A melody note might be altered to allow a phrase to land more sensibly. With all that said, respect was paid to the shape and content of the source material. I didn't set out to rewrite these wonderful songs, just put them into a context where they could be performed by recitalists. The songs in this group were selected because they offered either an emotional, dramatic or musical potential worth exploring.
"Ten Thousand Miles Away" was found in Carl Sandburg's "The American Songbag." "The Farmer's Curst Wife" was found in "The Penguin Book of American Folk Songs," edited by Alan Lomax.
My respect and thanks to the men and women who have lived the experience, put it into song, and passed it down to their children. Thanks also to those who have made it their life's work to track down and preserve for us these poetic expressions of our past. --Steven Mark Kohn
These songs were commissioned by Credit Suisee and premiered by the great bass-baritone Bryn Terfel at Carnegie Hall in 2002. Terfel asked for songs that let him portray fantastical characters. Heggie didn’t need to look any further than his favorite poet, Vachel Lindsay for inspiration.