Harmonium, a towering choral symphony set in three actions, is without doubt one of the earliest main works of American composer John Adams (b. 1947). It was composed in 1980 for the opening season of Davies Symphony Corridor, the house of the San Francisco Symphony. Following such items as Common Tones in Simple Time and Phrygian Gates, it’s music which expands on the pulse-and-pattern Minimalism of Steve Reich.’
The titles of the three poems which make up the textual content (the primary by English Elizabethan poet John Donne and the opposite two by Emily Dickinson) sound as in the event that they might be the titles of rock songs. The drama and ambiance of the poems pervade the music. However we’re additionally drawn into its magical time-altering circulate, its dreamy tonal colours, and the pure sound of single phrases and syllables. We’re confronted with the grandeur of a single suspended concord, and the ability of step by step constructing pressure over lengthy durations of time. The calm, celestial ultimate notes of the second motion circulate straight into the third motion’s visceral eruption and glittering, ecstatic launch.
In his program observe, the composer writes:
Harmonium was composed in 1980 in a small studio on the third ground of an outdated Victorian home within the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco. These of my mates who knew each the room and the piece of music have been amused {that a} piece of such spaciousness ought to emerge from such cramped quarters. The title of the work was all that survived from my preliminary intention to set poems from Wallace Stevens’s assortment of the identical identify. After I noticed that Stevens’s language and rhythmic sense was not my very own, I solid far and vast for a textual content to fulfill a musical picture that I had in thoughts. That picture was considered one of human voices–lots of them–driving upon waves of rippling sound. Finally I settled on three poems of transcendental imaginative and prescient. “Adverse Love” by John Donne examines the qualities of varied types of love, ascending within the method of Plato’s Symposium, from the carnal to the divine. I seen this “ascent” as a sort of vector, having each velocity and course. Musically, this meant a proper form that started with a single, pulsing observe (a D above center C) that, by the method of accretion, turns into a tone cluster, then a chord, and ultimately an enormous, calmly rippling present of sound that takes on power and mass till it will definitely crests on an immense cataract of sound some ten minutes later. Thus far, I nonetheless take into account “Adverse Love” some of the satisfying architectural experiments in all my work.
The 2 Dickinson poems present the polar opposites of her poetic voice. “As a result of I May Not Cease for Demise” is the intimate, hushed Dickinson, whose beyond-the-grave monologue is a sequence of photographs from a brief life, a sort of pastoral elegy expressed via the lens of a slow-motion digicam. Like Aaron Copland earlier than me, I unknowingly set the bowdlerized model of the unique, being unaware on the time that the poet’s unique model differed considerably in syntax from the extra smoothed-out, standard model made by Thomas Wentworth Higginson.
Following the final palpitations of the gradual motion the music enters a transition part, a sort of bardo stage between the top of 1 life and the start of a brand new one. Once more, as in “Adverse Love,” the music step by step assumes weight, pressure and velocity till it’s hurled headlong into the brilliant, vibrant clangor of “Wild Nights.” Right here is the opposite aspect of Emily Dickinson, saturated with an intoxicated, ecstatic, urgent urge to dissolve herself in some non-public and unknowable union of eros and loss of life. The metaphors, without delay violent and sexually hypercharged, play upon the picture of a “coronary heart in port”, safe and out of hazard from the wild storm-tossed sea. A lot has been written about Emily Dickinson, and her mysterious persona has been subjected to a lot speculative evaluation, that it’s at all times a shock to come across these texts alone and away from any sort of exegesis.
This recording options the San Francisco Symphony, led by John Adams:
I. Adverse Love:
II. As a result of I May Not Cease for Demise:
III. Wild Nights:
Right here is the textual content:
I by no means stoop’d so low, as they
Which on a watch, cheek, lip can prey.
Seldom to them, which soar no larger
Than advantage or the thoughts to admire.
For sense, and understanding might
Know what offers gasoline to their fireplace:
My love, although foolish, is extra courageous,
For might I miss, when’er I crave,
If I do know but, what I’d have.
If that be merely perfectest
Which might by no means be categorical’d
However Negatives, my love is so.
To All, which all love, I say no.
If any who deciphers finest,
What we all know not, our selves, can know,
Let him educate me that nothing; this
As but my ease and luxury is,
Although I velocity not, I can’t miss.
– John Donne
As a result of I couldn’t cease for Demise,
He kindly stopped for me;
The carriage held however simply ourselves
And Immortality.
We slowly drove, he knew no haste,
And I put away
My labor, and my leisure too,
For his civility.
We handed the varsity the place youngsters performed
At wrestling in a hoop;
We handed the fields of gazing grain,
We handed the setting solar.
We paused earlier than a home that appeared
A swelling of the bottom:
The roof was scarcely seen,
The cornice however a mound.
Since then ‘tis centuries; however every
Feels shorter than the day
I first surmised the horses’ heads
Had been towards eternity.
– Emily Dickinson
Wild Nights–Wild Nights!
Had been I with thee
Wild Nights must be
Out Luxurious!
Futile–the winds–
To a Coronary heart in port–
Accomplished with the Compass–
Accomplished with the Chart!
Rowing in Eden–
Ah, the ocean!
May I however moor–Tonight–
In thee!
– Emily Dickinson
Recordings
- Adams: Harmonium, John Adams, San Francisco Symphony, San Francisco Symphony Refrain Amazon
Featured Picture: {photograph} by Vern Evans
