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Many years ago, I don’t remember where, I purchased an anthology of poems called Poets Against the War. Published in 2003, edited by poet Sam Hamill, the anthology was culled from some 11,000 or so poems, submitted in response to a poetry symposium planned at the White House by Laura Bush. Upon her realization of what the event could become, she cancelled the symposium. Instead, on the day it was to take place, poetry readings were conducted in over 200 locations around the country.

Ever since reading the book, I’ve had it in the back of my mind to set some of the poems to music. A number of pages had the corners turned down for that purpose, and I had some sketches, but never quite got around to finishing the work. However, in light of current events around the world – not just here in the U.S. with a lunatic raving in the White House – the need to get back to this became more urgent for me.

Finally sitting down and getting to it, the songs poured out quickly, and I finished setting seven poems over the course of a few weeks. Maybe, some day, I will find someone to perform it – but in the meantime, I don’t quite care. I needed to write this.

Happy to get an email last night from the fabulous cellist, Matt Goeke, letting me know that he, along with violist Ina Litera, will be performing my viola/cello duo, Passion, at the Summerkeys faculty concert in Lubec, Maine this coming June.

Then in the fall, their group Eight Strings & a Whistle, with flutist Suzanne Gilchrest, will perform my new trio, Melville’s Dream, written for them.

In the midst of a severe winter storm, with windy gusts and snow pelting the windows, I finished setting Erich Kastner’s poem, Der Februar, for soprano and viola d’amore. The weather was fitting, as I set music to “Und es schneit, und taut, und schneit.”

The connectivity of the internet never ceases to amaze me, as the request to write this music came from a viola d’amore player in Germany, Gertrud Schmidt. I haven’t found her on Facebook or LinkedIn, so I’m not sure how she found out about my music – but however, all good. She, along with soprano Berenike Langmaack, will be performing my 5 Rilke Songs along with this new work.

Reading about the poet, Erich Kastner, who I hadn’t heard of previously, was fascinating. He was drafted into the German army during WW I, and his experiences there made him a life-long pacifist – a point of view that was, to say the least, little appreciated after the Nazis came into power. Despite being interrogated on several occasions by the Gestapo, he survived their regime, all the while writing poems and stories for children. Der Februar is part of a series, so maybe this first song will lead to more…

The performance by Voice of Ascension of Monteverdi’s Vespers of 1610 was, simply, glorious. I felt so grateful at having the opportunity to hear it performed live, at last. Yes, the music is exquisite, from start to finish. But Monteverdi’s masterpiece is more than that. Listening to it, I kept thinking of how certain rare artists step so easily outside the boundaries of the practice of their times and create something entirely new. More contemporary examples that spring to mind (although there are many others) include Picasso shaking the world of art, or in music, perhaps Stravinsky. In literature, Dante comes to mind as an artist who very consciously set about to begin a ‘dolce stil nove’ that shaped everything that came after.

As I listened, the sounds of other music from around 1610 was also in my mind, and as great as that music is, the fantastic variety and freshness of every movement from the Vespers stands out. The way he knits a whole out of greatly contrasting parts, balancing masses of sound against the most intimate of settings, was groundbreaking. That I still feel the newness in his music, sitting in a church pew in New York City in 2018, was also a testament to a great performance by Dennis Keene and the wonderful singers and instrumentalists assembled for this extraordinary concert.

It has been many, many years since I last heard Parsifal. The music is as glorious as I remembered. However, as much as I reveled in the performance I attended at the Met last night, I am struggling to understand whether the faults I saw in it were the result of a weak production, or inherent in the work itself. The orchestra and singers were better than I’ve seen at the Met in years – so it wasn’t that. The staging, however, struck me as bizarre, and the way it shoved the Christian symbolism in your face, distracted rather than supported the message evident in the music by itself. The music is ecstatic, opening up a door to human redemption from our inherent failures and frailties. The staging was, to my mind, a rather confused mess.

The scenery and staging in this production constantly distracted from the glory of the music. That was particularly evident in the 2nd act, when the entire cast was wading through a pool of blood that filled the entire stage. All one could focus on, instead of the music, was how uncomfortable that must for the cast and chorus, as they became drenched in red. The 3rd act wasn’t much better. As the libretto spoke of spring and redemption, the cast looked like they were trapped on a lunar landscape or a lifeless destroyed landscape after the destruction of war. The culminating moment of the four hours of glorious music turned out to be Parsifal sticking the tip of his spear into an open cup. Oh, well. That made it all rather laughable, rather than profound.

That said, I don’t believe all of the blame belonged to a misguided production. To my mind, Wagner’s jumbled confusion of magic, Arthurian legend and Christian symbolism was an inherent weakness that was only exacerbated by the silliness of the production. The libretto is a philosophical mish-mash. The message of the music is clear, but his libretto is anything but. Ultimately, for future listening, I think it would be better to ignore the story and just listen to it as pure music. With the contrasts between the feeling conveyed by the music in the three acts, the music is all that is needed to tell the story of how we yearn for the innocence and glory that all humans lose from the moment we are born and hope, ever after, to regain.

For many years, I wrote music regularly, but without having time to listen as much as I might have liked to the music of others. As I’m at the stage in life now where I’m close to retirement and only working part-time, I’ve been enjoying the luxury of listening a lot more to many different composers. As I do so, the experience has confirmed an old impression I have that music (at least contemporary classical music) falls roughly into two schools: one relies on pitch relationships as a primary organizing element and the other seeks to create coloristic effects and the interplay of different timbres. I realize what I’ve just written is a vast generalization and over-simplification, but in the interest of brevity, that about sums up a lot of what I’ve listened to recently. My own music is solidly in the former camp, but as a listener, both certainly have their appeal! As electronics has become an ever growing part of the composer’s toolkit, the latter seems to predominant, as it seems (at least to me) that what electronics brings is limitless possibilities of sound effects. In that sense, I’m definitely old school, writing notes for musicians playing orchestral instruments to play.