Download I love the challenge of art song. Where in opera, one has the

I love the challenge of art song. Where in opera, one has the opportunity to tell the
story told by librettist and composer over an extended period of time, in art song one has
a very limited time to develop the musical and dramatic ideas of the poet and composer.
Sometimes less than a minute! Finding the link between text and music to understand the
composer’s intentions is paramount. While I will focus on one piece (Night by Jeffrey
Wood) for this essay, I have found many composers whose works I very much enjoy
performing. Rachel Devore Fogarty, Alan Louis Smith (I promise, I’m not flattering…I
very much enjoyed performing Covered Wagon Woman!), Copland – the common thread
of the art song that I enjoy is a compelling idea or story that the composer links
masterfully to the music.
Preparing Jeffrey Wood’s song cycle Night has been one of the most satisfying
experiences with art song for me. Originally written for guitar and mezzo, then
transcribed for piano and mezzo, I have had the good fortune to have prepared certain
movements of it for performance more than once, and using both instrumentations. I first
learned this piece while in graduate school. I was doing quite a bit of performing with
one of the guitar students and we decided to tackle the entire cycle for a concert we were
planning. Jeffrey Wood is the composition professor at Austin Peay, where I was
working on my M.M., and he was very generous with his time and feedback as we
prepared what turned out to be a very difficult piece. The difficulty with Night is not only
musical. The poetry deals with the silence of God in the face of human suffering, moving
from indifference by God to an eventual higher understanding of their relationship with
God by the narrator. It includes poetry by authors such as existentialist John Clare and
Paul Celan, a Holocaust survivor. Needless to say, Night is emotionally challenging. Both
times I have prepared it, I have sat with the text; digging deeper and deeper for a more
complete understanding. Musically, dramatically, emotionally – it is one of the most
satisfying pieces I have ever performed.
I have been fortunate enough both times I have prepared Night to have
collaborators who have strong ideas about the piece. I prepared the piece first with
guitarist Tom Torrisi, a fellow graduate student at Austin Peay. We had many, many
debates on the “chicken vs. egg” topic of text and music. These debates, the free sharing
of ideas, and all the time spent preparing the piece gave us an understanding of each other
that allowed us to achieve what I like to think of as the collaborator’s version of the
Vulcan mind-meld. No matter what happened on stage, we always knew where the other
was headed and could match them. It gave our performance of Night an intimacy for the
audience that Jeffrey Wood told us was exactly what he was looking for.