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The Whole Motion:
William Bolcom’s Songs of Innocence and of Experience
reviewed by Grant Nebel
William Bolcom began setting poems from William
Blake’s cycle Songs of Innocence and of Experience as early
as 1956; he began work on the full cycle in earnest in 1973. The work
was first heard entire in Ann Arbor, Michigan in 1984, and in late
2004, Naxos released a new recording of the complete work on its
American Classics label. So this work, taking up most of the second
half of the twentieth century, gives us a chance to look at a uniquely
twentieth-century and uniquely Mahlerian genre, the symphony-oratorio.
A genre can best be thought of as a set of rules for producing a work
of art. The symphony-oratorio incorporates two different kinds of
works, and therefore two different sets of rules for making a work.
It’s a genre that’s divided against itself and, still, in its best
cases, manages to stand. Some of my favorite artists, in whatever
medium, create works that belong to a genre yet violate its rules. (If
Mahler had done nothing else, I’d be grateful to him for pushing the
symphony so far past the four-movement form in so many ways.) The
symphony-oratorio, because of its inherent contradictions, always
manages to violate its own rules somewhere.
This genre, then, is not a single set of rules but two of them, and
the works described here take their places along a continuum. At one
end is the song cycle, with a unity of texts, often by the same
author, or on the same theme, or both. The song cycle is, in the
editor’s word, excerptable; each piece stands on its own but also
gains from being part of a larger work. Mahler’s Kindertotenlieder
as well as Bob Dylan’s Highway 61 Revisited fall into this end of
the space. The song cycle possesses the quality of intimacy; it’s an
orchestral outpost of the Lied. (Strauss’s Four Last Songs
sound lovely in orchestral arrangements, but they are clearly
arrangements of something that’s meant for solo voice accompanied by
a single instrument.)
At the other end is the symphony with lyrics, where the unity is
musical, not textual. The work is whole only on its own, and the texts
work to support the music, not the other way around. The texts might
have a unifying theme or author, but that matters less than the
unifying music. (In some cases, the texts aren’t in the same
language.) If the song cycle possesses an intimate, personal
character, the symphony with lyrics is loud, public, and declamatory.
Mahler’s Eighth Symphony lands closer to this end of the spectrum.
Other works, many of them contemporaneous with the composition of
Bolcom’s Songs, join Mahler’s Eighth at the symphonic end of the
spectrum. Louis Andriessen’s De Materie, in its four
movements and nearly two hours, incorporates letters from the
physicist Marie Curie, a monologue about the artist Piet Mondrian, the
Dutch Declaration of Independence, and a set of shipbuilding
instructions among other texts. Elliot Goldenthal’s Fire Water
Paper: A Vietnam Oratorio, premiered in Orange County,
California, home to communities of Vietnam veterans and Vietnamese
refugees, pulls together Buddhist texts, the French Catholic mass,
poets by (Vietnam War veteran) Yusef Koumanakayaa, the names of
American military operations and Vietnamese children’s songs. (A
composer for film and theater, Goldenthal expertly raids other works:
a flute solo calls up Das Lied von der Erde and his own score for Alien3;
Jimi Hendrix’s version of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” and the
phat chromatic chord from Mahler’s Tenth Symphony.) (“Phat” is a
hip-hop term that refers to, among other things, beats that are
particularly loud or resonant. In a vastly different genre, it exactly
describes the function of the recurring chord of the Mahler
Tenth.) Philip Glass’s Fifth Symphony uses a global collection of
texts on themes of death and transcendence—all, in varying degrees
of success, set into English.
Three works deserve special mention: First and second,
Shostakovich’s Thirteenth and Fourteenth Symphonies define distant
points on the spectrum. The Thirteenth (“Babi Yar”), large and
choral and public, is in fact politically subversive: the act of
setting the poems of Evgeny Yevtushentko already placed this work at
risk. The subject matter of the poetry is public, though: the massacre
at Babi Yar, the role of humor and careers in the former USSR. The
rhetoric is public as well: horn calls, unison strings—it’s easily
the most accessible of Shostakovich’s late works. The poems are
unified by their public subjects and by a single author.
Shostakovich’s Fourteenth Symphony, though, is both darker and more
intimate. Like much of his a late works, this one is heavily
chromatic, with much work for solo instruments. Instead of a chorus we
have two voices, a soprano and a bass; instead of five texts of one
author we have nearly a dozen texts from four different authors. The
only unifying things are the obsession with death, and the extremes of
the musical rhetoric; shouts and cries from the vocalist, a
twelve-tone row from the strings. (Shostakovich referred to this work
in much the same terms that Mahler referred to Das Lied von der
Erde, stating that it was neither symphony nor song cycle.)
Perhaps the most successful—at least the most
complex—symphony-oratorio of the last century is Britten’s War
Requiem. Here a symphonic structure imposes an order on a diverse
set of texts—the Latin Mass for the Dead and Wilifred Owen’s war
poems. Musical motives and a recurring tritone provide unity, and
Britten scores the work with a Mahlerian breadth of forces. Britten
solves the problem of the public/private split in the work by
separating the instrumental groups: the full orchestra and the chorus
get the Latin, where the solo voices and a chamber orchestra take the
Owen text. Each of the six movements alternates a choral declamation
of the Missa pro Defunctis with a subtle reading of an Owen
poem; in the last movement, even the chamber orchestra dies away, and
we only hear the singing of Owen’s words.
Bolcom handles this by moving closer to the song cycle end of the
genre. The overarching structure is a nine-movement work, broken into
three groups of three: three parts to the Songs of Innocence and six
to the Songs of Experience (three to Volume I, three to Volume
II). Each part consists of four to nine songs or interludes. Within
each part there is a clear arc, with the last piece usually ending
quietly. However, the overall impression is of a diverse group of
songs, and Bolcom acknowledges this. If a symphony is a world,
Bolcom’s work is a population.
This is reinforced by the manner of presenting them. Many are given a
choral presentation, but most of the songs are handled by soloists in
a style that is both musical and theatrical. Blake writes from many
points of view (the divergence between innocence and experience is
only the first), and Bolcom gives these viewpoints voices. Often the
songs get the highlighting of a single, featured instrument; listen,
for example, to the harmonica of Peter “Madcat” Ruth.
Bolcom’s Songs of Innocence and of Experience certainly
requires forces comparable to (and most likely exceeding) that of
Mahler’s Eighth. The Naxos liner notes include a picture of the
“close to 450” performers required for the work. In addition to
choruses and a large group of featured vocalists, Bolcom requires a
large instrumentarium, including fiddle, mandolin, electric violin,
recorder, keyboards, the aforementioned harmonica, and electric bass
(something I’ve always claimed can never be used enough in any kind
of music.)
Rather than be described as a unified work, Bolcom’s might best be
described as a happily disunified work. For the texts, this is
entirely appropriate: Blake saw these works as a vast sampling not
just of attitudes and beliefs but also of styles, and Bolcom follows
this. The vocal lines are shaped with great care for the singers; the
memories are memorable and serve English meters well. For example, the
setting for one of Blake’s darkest works, “London” (“I
wander’d thro each charter’d street/Near where the charter’d
Thames does flow/And mark in every face I meet/Marks of weakness,
marks of woe”), with a big-band riff alternating with a menacing
bass line, could have come out of Jonathan Larson’s musical Rent.
The singers sing and declaim quite expressively; the setting of most
of the songs has a definite affect.
The two Divine Images also give a sense of the breadth of Bolcom’s
settings. For the version in Songs of Innocence (“For Mercy
has a human heart, / Pity a human face, / And Love, the human form
divine, / And Peace, the human dress”) Bolcom provides a light
orchestration and a delicate soprano line; there’s a close
resemblance to this and Barber’s Knoxville: Summer of 1914. Only a
few dissonant washes suggest that there might be anything to worry
about here.
The second Divine Image, from Songs of Experience (“Cruelty
has a Human Heart,/And Jealousy a Human Face;/Terror the Human Form
Divine,/And Secrecy the Human Dress”) receives, for about three of
its five-and-a-half minutes, one of the best treatments in the work.
Rather than set this with Sturm und Drang, Bolcom uses a funky little
riff that wouldn’t be out of place when a talk-show band “plays
over” as the host walks from the stage to the desk. Nathan Lee
Graham brings in an equally funky vocal that suggests an
audience-suggested improv at Second City. Bolcom recognizes here that
of all Blake’s works, this one needs no more terror, and the
lightest treatment will make the most drama. The tension of the form
catches up to him, though, and the need for a Big Finish to the work
(unnecessary—the preceding movement is a wordless, bracingly chaotic
blast from the orchestra) leads him to give up the funk in a John
Williams-style crescendo.
The production is everything we’ve come to expect from Naxos: the
orchestral sounds boldly without devolving into muddiness; vocal parts
are clear and well-defined against the musical backdrop. The only
possible quibble I have is that some of conductor Leonard Slatkin’s
tempos are a bit slow and reverent; Bolcom makes a musical case that
Blake should be taken quickly and conversationally.
Since this whole genre owes so much to Mahler, both in Das Lied von
der Erde and the Eighth Symphony, it is worth asking what the term
“Mahlerian” can mean. It’s easy to slap the adjective on any big
work with lyrics, and yet Bolcom’s work and Shostakovich’s
Fourteenth Symphony strike me as Mahlerian, while Andriessen’s work
and Shostakovich Thirteenth’s do not. “Mahlerian” might be best
understood as not a style but an attitude, one that gives private
thoughts and feelings public force. It’s not a word often applied to
Mahler, but both the Eighth Symphony and Bolcom’s work are fun
masterpieces; they are big works on private themes that also do a
great job of entertaining, of giving an audience value for time and
money spent.
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