Winner of the 2020 Virgil Thomson Award for vocal music from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, composer James Primosch explores his life in song, from his earliest inspirations to his latest compositions.
Let's begin with music. From a newly released disc on Albany Records, Descent/Return, featuring songs and piano music by myself and John Harbison, Lucy Fitz Gibbon sings Who Do You Say That I Am? (2016). Ryan MacEvoy McCullough is the pianist.
The text by Kathleen Norris is a series of increasingly ecstatic responses to the question Christ asks his disciples in the title. The musical language here is only one part of the spectrum of possibilities I have employed in my songwriting as I seek to respond to the text and create a compelling play of musical forms. The song’s D-flat major frame contrasts with the thoroughly atonal setting of Robert Francis' witty The Pitcher (2017) that precedes it on the album. What led me to this diversity of expression, and what led me to compose songs?
I don’t think of myself as a song composer but as a composer who has written songs. The other day I counted how many songs for voice and piano I have written, and came up with 29 such pieces. Some are grouped into cycles, some are independent songs, and some also exist in orchestrated versions with chamber ensemble. There are also vocal pieces originally conceived for orchestra or chamber ensemble that don't (yet) exist in piano versions and a good deal of choral music. It's not a huge number of voice and piano songs compared with some of my colleagues who are truly known as “song composers,” yet song is a significant portion of my catalog so far.
I think what principally brought me to song was my work as a pianist collaborating with singers. As an undergraduate, I did some accompanying of standard repertoire, but my most important experiences came later, as a graduate student at Penn and Columbia. Being a composer, most of my playing focused on 20th-century classics, including Ives, Schoenberg (a complete Das Buch der hängenden Gärten), Barber, and Berio (the very early Four Canzoni Popolari, which includes music that later went into the well-known Folk Songs set) as well as works by my peers Eric Chasalow, Morris Rosenzweig, David Rakowski, Robert Yekovich and senior colleagues John Harbison, Miriam Gideon, and Martin Boykin.
I also accompanied my own Three Sacred Songs (1989). This piece was requested by Christine Schadeberg, a singer with whom I had frequently worked. She wanted to start a Town Hall solo recital with folk song arrangements. While I wasn't interested in using folk songs, I came up with the notion of working with tunes I had learned in my work as a church musician as the basis for new concert pieces. I used two chant melodies and a fifteenth-century carol, all with Latin texts. The original version of the piece has not been recorded, but here is Susan Narucki singing the last of the set in a version for voice and chamber ensemble (for this ensemble version I inserted an additional song between the first and second of the original set). The recording above, issued on Bridge, also includes the 21st Century Consort conducted by Christopher Kendall.
I should say that this work as a church musician – I had been playing for Sunday Masses, weddings and funerals since I was a young teen – was also an important way for me to gain experience in working with singers, usually of modest skills, whether it be solo singers or the small choir of amateurs that I accompanied and later directed during my time at Columbia. I also wrote pieces for that Columbia group, including a fair number of songs for congregational participation. You don't have to work with professionals or aspiring professionals to learn something about the human voice, about general attributes that all singers share, about the lovable specificity of particular voices, each with unique capabilities and limitations. Of course, you learn a lot about practicality when writing for non-professionals, both in terms of possibilities and challenges. Thank you to all those church volunteers along the way who taught me about singing!
Playing for singers also taught me about writing for the piano when combined with singing: how to deploy harmonies so as to support but not obscure the voice; how to create textures that would conjure the expressive aura demanded by a text; how to manage the dance of following, leading, and sharing that happens among the notes themselves and between the performers bringing those notes to life. Learning to place a piano chord in proper alignment with exactly the correct particle of text taught me about shaping rhythms in my own text setting. And playing splendid songs, learning them through my fingers, absorbing them through long rehearsals, observing what worked well, and what worked less well, engaging with the music bodily: this was the best possible school for song writing.
Before the Three Sacred Songs, I had written two songs for Christine Schadeberg, which, in an orchestrated version, supplemented by additional settings, formed the basis of my Columbia dissertation piece, a solo cantata for soprano and chamber orchestra called The Cloud of Unknowing (1984). The piece drew on texts from diverse sources – Hopkins, Donne, Thomas Merton, Brother Antoninus and the anonymous medieval author of the work that gave my piece its title. I employed this anthology approach in more than one subsequent cycle, and I think my inclination to bring together texts from various times and places finds a parallel in the diverse vocabularies at play in my music.
In the 1990’s I wrote a couple of individual songs, setting a verse of Psalm 116 for an AIDS Quilt Songbook concert, and making a version of How Can I Keep From Singing? (1996) for an all-Primosch program at the Cleveland Museum of Art. This was alongside projects for chorus and for solo voice with ensemble. The latter included a Rilke cycle and a piece with early instruments on texts from The Tempest. I later made a soprano and piano version of Ariel's three songs from that Shakespeare piece.
I took a big step along the path of piano and voice song when I wrote Holy the Firm (1999) for Dawn Upshaw and Gilbert Kalish. Dawn discovered my work while judging an art song contest sponsored by G. Schirmer. I had submitted Bedtime, the first of my many Denise Levertov settings. Dawn subsequently programmed Bedtime, even including it in a group of songs by composers of her own generation in her Carnegie Hall recital debut, and later requested I write her a complete cycle. I wrote a set of five songs that share motivic material and follow a dramatic arc, bound together in that provision is made in the score for attacca connections between the songs (though there are proper endings provided if the songs are excerpted for independent performance). There is also a later chamber ensemble version of the piece. There are two texts by Annie Dillard, one by Denise Levertov, one by John Climacus (a monk of the Sinai in the 6th and 7th centuries), and one by American poet and critic Susan Stewart. This was the first of many times I would work with Susan's words, including texts written specifically for projects. Though Dawn performed the entire cycle several times, it was this Susan Stewart setting, called Cinder, that she subsequently toured with and assigned to her students at Bard. Cinder is my most performed song, indeed my most performed piece of any kind. Here is a performance by Mary Mackenzie, with Heidi Williams, piano, from another album on Albany Records:
Cinder
We needed fire to make
the tongs and tongs to hold
us from the flame; we needed
ash to clean the cloth
and cloth to clean the ash’s
stain; we needed stars
to find our way, to make
the light that blurred the stars;
we needed death to mark
an end, an end that time
in time could mend.
Born in love, the consequence—
born of love, the need.
Tell me, ravaged singer,
how the cinder bears the seed.
The chain of paradoxes in Susan Stewart’s poem reads like a series of folk proverbs. The lines “Born in love, the consequence– born of love, the need” are a kind of archetype into which all the other pairs of the poem fit. The rhythm and structure of these lines are also the source of the recurring melodic shape first heard in the introduction. This figure always overlaps with its echo, reflecting the "doublenesses" in the poem. Two points about the text that may be obscure: “ash to clean the cloth” refers to the fact that ash can be an ingredient in soap, while “cinder bears the seed” refers to pine cones that only release their seed when burned.
My music, vocal or not, often embraces diverse harmonic vocabularies. You could almost write out a pop music lead sheet for Cinder, while Deathbeds, the next song in the set, begins with decidedly atonal harmonies. Rather than the tightly focused language of Webern or Varese, my musical world is often more like that of Mahler or Ives, or that of my teachers George Crumb and George Rochberg (themselves fans of Mahler and Ives.) I love Webern and Varese, but my natural tendency is to embrace a variety of means to serve a wide range of expressive types. What you might call the centrifugal force of this variety is balanced by the centripetal tendency created by my reliance on recurring motifs and even phrases across the songs of Holy the Firm. Harmonic variety is balanced by motivic and melodic economy.
My next big vocal piece was intended for Dawn as well; while that didn't work out, I did receive a superb first performance from Lisa Saffer. It's an orchestral cycle of Rilke settings called From a Book of Hours (2001). Commissioned by the Chicago Symphony, it was conducted by Antonio Pappano in early 2002. I tried making a piano version of the piece for Lisa and pianist Judith Gordon, but I'm not happy with that version (through no fault of Lisa and Judy!). More successful was a version with chamber ensemble. Here's Susan Narucki singing the last piece in that version of the set.
I returned to both Rilke and Susan Stewart for a cycle with baritone and chamber ensemble called Dark the Star (2008). This also includes an orchestrated version of my earlier Psalm 116 setting. Because the work uses another anthology of texts from varied sources, the composing began with ordering the texts so as to make a convincing expressive arc. This yielded a set of 9 short songs performed without pause, with two of the poems set twice. Dark the Star is full of shadows. The Susan Stewart poems are called “Shadow/Shadow” and “Shadow/Lintel”; when I checked with Susan to see if she was OK with my juxtapositions of her work and Rilke, she told me yes, saying I had found Rilke texts that were shadows of her own; I think of these two-fold settings as shadow versions. Here's William Sharp singing one of the Susan Stewart poems, “Shadow/Lintel.” This is again with the 21st Century Consort and Christopher Kendall conducting.
In all my songs I have no qualms about word-painting and taking my cue from the images in the text. The scene, so to speak, for “Shadow/Lintel” is a columbarium, a room or building with niches for funeral urns to be stored. The eerie opening ostinato creates a deeply mysterious, dream-like, and even frightening atmosphere. There is a clarinet gesture that opens outward when “the door swung open then” and downward cascades from all the instruments for “endless more.” The steady tread of the piece reflects the footprints in the dust: “one print stepping after another.”
From a Book of Hours was well-received in Chicago, and the administration there asked me to create another cycle, this time for baritone. They also asked me to consider working with a living poet. Not only did I choose a living poet, I did them one better by asking Susan Stewart to write poems specifically for the project. Having been told the piece would be for baritone, she came up with a set of Songs for Adam (2009), rooted in the Biblical stories. You might say Adam is the ur-baritone. In the songs Adam learns to speak–indeed, to sing; he names what he finds in the garden; Eve is created; the two are expelled from the garden. The last song narrates the Cain and Abel story. Brian Mulligan sang magnificently at the premiere, with Sir Andrew Davis conducting. Like so many orchestral works created today, the piece awaits a second performance so I am working on a version for string quartet and piano.
While honoring the images and moods of a text is important, I also try to respond to the form of a poem. Form in Susan Stewart's poem on the expulsion in Songs for Adam is delineated by several voices: God addressing Adam and Eve; a narrator framing God's statements; lines in parentheses describing God, and a central oracular passage in italics.
4. (the cool of the evening)
Do you know every herb and seed?
he asked as he walked in the cool of the evening
(This god has intent and direction,
he knows where he’s going in the cool of the evening)
Would you like to stay in the garden?
he asked as he walked in the cool of the evening
(This god has the leisure and means
to walk out alone in the cool of the evening)
There are two trees, but only one is of good and evil.
There are two trees, but only one is in the midst of the garden
There are two trees, but only one is the tree of life
cherubim guard the gate and a sword
hangs crashed, hangs flailing, in flames
Do you follow the deed with a double regret?
he asked as he walked in the cool of the evening
(This god cannot hide if he is everywhere,
he gathers his thoughts in the cool of the evening.)
Cover your face with your hands and run,
cover yourselves and run.
The music distinguishes among these voices, with melodic material recurring when they return. Of course, this particular formal issue is at least as old as Erlkönig, and represents a challenge for the singer as well. I enjoy the task of making my piece reflect a text’s form, a kind of compositional restraint that both limits one’s choices but thereby generates possible solutions to musical problems.
Since Adam, I have written a number of individual voice and piano songs, on texts by Susan Scott Thompson, Susan Orlean, Christina Rossetti, Sarah Williams, Robert Francis, and Herman Melville. In each case, it was a “love at first sight” encounter with the text. I usually don't go looking for texts, I simply come across them in my reading, and I have a fair number in my files that are awaiting the right moment. The Susan Scott Thompson song, Waltzing the Spheres (2011), was an exception in that my first encounter with the text was not reading it, but hearing it read on a PBS telecast on 9/11. Still, I had the intuitive, instantaneous sense of “yes, I will set that.” Often a great deal of time passes between the moment I encounter a text and the completion of the setting, ten years in this case. There are even more extreme examples: my choral work Fire-Memory/River-Memory from 1997 includes a poem I first read during my undergraduate days over twenty years earlier.
I have also made a few more sets of songs in recent years. Twenty years after making my version of “How Can I Keep From Singing?,” I added two more hymn tunes – “Be Thou My Vision” and “What Wondrous Love Is This?” – to make a set of Three Folk Hymns, a sort of English language analog to the Three Sacred Songs. And my most recently completed songs are a set of Two Whitman Love Songs (2019), commissioned by Lyric Fest. There is also a cycle of songs with chamber ensemble called A Sibyl (2017) this time for soprano and six players, again on texts of Susan Stewart. Originally intended as a piece for dramatic soprano and orchestra, I wrote this chamber version after the grander project fell through. I made voice and piano versions of two of the six songs in this set, and the title for that pair, Descent/Return, is the title work for Lucy Fitz Gibbon’s new album.
Susan’s poems reflect on the mysterious prophetess spoken of in Virgil and Ovid. The sibyl sings of her prophecies written on leaves, and of how the god possesses her; she warns Aeneas before his descent to the underworld; she celebrates the moon. Having been granted eternal life, but failing to ask for eternal youth, she is reduced to no more than her voice. I understand the sibyl as an archetype of the musician who sings for us of fate and the mysteries of life, death, and love; who guides us in moonlit and shadowy places; and whose prophetic voice resounds unendingly, in power, and in vulnerability. I am grateful to all those singers who have put their power, and their vulnerability, at the service of my music.
“Cinder” from THE FOREST by Susan Stewart. © 1995 University of Chicago Press. All rights reserved.
“Songs for Adam” from RED ROVER by Susan Stewart. Copyright © 2008 University of Chicago Press. All rights reserved.
July 20, 2020
