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nicholasryankelly

Text Selection and Meaning(lessness) in Choral Music (Or: What do choir directors have against Carl Sandburg?)

Updated: Sep 26

TL;DR - As creatives who work with words, choral musicians can sometimes get sucked into our culture's capitalistic obsession with concrete, unambiguous "meaning"--especially when selecting a text to work with. But humans are subjective, multifaceted creatures, and music can help us get in touch with the glorious messiness of our nature as such--if we don't let our obsession with specificity hold us back.


If you're a choral composer--especially one like me, who usually has to propose a project before actually being commissioned--has this happened to you? You send a piece to a conductor or publisher--or propose a new project to a potential collaborator--and they reject it because of the text and its meaning (or apparent lack thereof).


Or, if you're lucky, you get to make an "elevator pitch" neatly summing up what the text means to you (omitting or destroying most of that meaning in the process of oversimplification.)


Ideally, these interactions would be the starting point for a much longer conversation--rather than outright rejections. Because poetry is such an important part of our art form--but what it actually means in the context of music is, I think, something that's not discussed nearly enough. Why do composers choose the texts we do, and how is a text's meaning altered when it is set to music and performed? If a poem has a clear meaning on its own, why do we bother making music out of it? I'd like to share some experiences from my own composing life that highlight why a text--and its meaning--cannot be judged on its own when it becomes part of a piece of music.


In my recent work, I've been more drawn towards texts that are either (1) imagistic, seemingly without any underlying message or (2) cryptic or ambiguous, at least on the surface. And when proposing these texts to choir directors, I often get a response along the lines of "I can't relate to what's going on in the poem" or "I can't see how this would translate into meaningful music."


And, respectfully, how I probably should respond is something like: "that's OK at this stage. I can relate to it--let's talk about why!--and my job in writing the music is to create a way you and your audience can, too." Remember: making music (as a composer or performer) is an act of creating new meaning, even when it's done with a preexisting text.


Is that too abstract? Here are some examples from my own compositional journey.


Case study: Carl Sandburg and "Birds in a Looking-Glass"


Carl Sandburg is probably the poet I've received the most pushback from conductors about. At first glance, his poems tend toward the simple and imagistic, but I think they're fantastic at hinting at a vast emotional world just beneath the surface. The cliché about poetry being about what is left unsaid is definitely true for Sandburg, and I think that's why I find his poems so musically fertile. The music's job is to bring that unspoken world to life, and that can be a deeply personal and inventive task for the composer.


One seemingly-"meaningless" Sandburg poem I recently set is "River Roads." On the surface, it's about... birds. What does it mean to you?


Let the crows go by hawking their caw and caw.

They have been swimming in midnights of coal mines somewhere.

Let ’em hawk their caw and caw.


Let the woodpecker drum and drum on a hickory stump.

He has been swimming in red and blue pools somewhere hundreds of years

And the blue has gone to his wings and the red has gone to his head.

Let his red head drum and drum.


Let the dark pools hold the birds in a looking-glass.

And if the pool wishes, let it shiver to the blur of many wings, old swimmers from old places.


Let the redwing streak a line of vermillion on the green wood lines.

And the mist along the river fix its purple in lines of a woman’s shawl on lazy shoulders.


--From Cornhuskers (1917). Public Domain in Canada and the USA.


Do you relate to it? Maybe you don't, and that's o.k. But I related deeply to it on several levels (for reasons I'll share below). And my job as a composer is to share that without words; to tie all those levels of meaning up in a neat musical package for the performers and audience to discover, experience, and make their own.


So why do I relate to this poem? Several reasons:


1) As a neurodivergent child, I was obsessively interested in birds for a time. In retrospect, I realize it wasn't just the birds: it was the different ways they related to their environments, the immense variations between their lifestyles and ecological niches, the strangeness and beauty in the patterns of their flight and vocalizations. Birds can tell us so much about our world--and they have their own separate world beyond our understanding. The sense of awe at those parallel worlds is something I've carried into adulthood, and something I tried to bring to life in the music.


2) My childhood home was right next to a cornfield. In autumn and winter, the field's acoustic changed when the leaves fell off the trees. It became vast and echoing, a concert hall for the crows and migrating geese. It was a very specific sense of fertile emptiness combined with autumnal melancholy that we don't have a word for--but I saw it in the poem, and I tried to bring it to life in the music.


3) I'll preface this point by saying I don't believe music needs to have a concrete message about how to live (and if it does, it has to be handled delicately--otherwise it can overshadow the experience of the music itself). But--as someone who cares deeply about the environment--I love how this poem invites us to experience the natural world as something complete in itself. Not something that only exists to the extent that it's useful or beautiful to humans, as capitalism wants us to view it. The birds were here first, and they carry a sort of ancient wisdom in their way of existing.


Although this last part was subconscious at the time, I think I made more references to ancient music and church music than usual when setting this poem. (It might be masked by the Coplandy sense of Americana I associate with Sandburg and my childhood home, but it's there!) This may have been my way of bringing out the near-eternal, quasi-spiritual aspects I see in the natural world: evolution, timescales beyond our comprehension, and such.


...and on and on. Hopefully it's clear by now that, for me personally, this text has immense musical potential precisely because the strong associations I have with it cannot be neatly summed up in words. Those associations are why I almost had to set it to music--and why I'm abnormally confident that performers will get something meaningful out of singing it. And almost none of that is there in the actual text.


Anyway, "Birds in a Looking-Glass" for SATB and piano will be co-premiered by 3 choirs across Canada this season!



Clark Street Bridge: Another Sandburg example (with actual music this time!)


Here's another Sandburg poem I've set, and also had rejected by potential performers because of the text.


Dust of the feet

And dust of the wheels,

Wagons and people going,

All day feet and wheels.


Now. . .

. . Only stars and mist

A lonely policeman,

Two cabaret dancers,

Stars and mist again,

No more feet or wheels,

No more dust and wagons.

     Voices of dollars

     And drops of blood

     . . . . .

     Voices of broken hearts,

     . . Voices singing, singing,

     . . Silver voices, singing,

     Softer than the stars,

     Softer than the mist.


--From Chicago Poems (1916). Public Domain in Canada and the USA.


This poem is obviously not just about a bridge. To me, it's about the unseen lives of strangers--the volumes upon volumes of life stories contained in just a single snapshot of a city street. The poem hints at what these lives are like, but the details are up to interpretation--and that's where composers can bring their individual perspectives.


The only other setting of this poem (aside from mine, which I'll get to later) that I could find is almost pastoral in quality: the people going home to rest at the end of a long, tiring day. Perfectly valid, and probably reflective of that composer's experience and values.


I brought a completely different musical character to the poem, framed by the contrast between day and night in its two stanzas. Since--to me--it's about our unspoken stories, I thought about how the daily grind of commerce can alienate us from those stories, and how the calm of night allows us (or, in uncomfortable cases, forces us) to reflect on them: the experiences we've had, and how they've shaped us.


This created the central contrast that drove the piece's form. Here's what resulted!


The hidden stories we carry with us was also a central theme in Now Boarding, which I wrote with a local poet about the Greyhound bus line. I remember discussing this poem with a conductor at some point in the years before I actually set it. They had casually asked about what texts I wanted to set in the future, and I remember describing this poem and meeting with obvious disapproval/confusion. I'm so glad I didn't take this reaction to heart... and, hopefully, so are the thousands of listeners and singers who have experienced this piece since then.


Final thoughts


So, to answer the somewhat tongue-in-cheek question in the title... what do choir directors have against Carl Sandburg? I can't say for sure, but in some cases, the fact that his poems don't usually have a clear moralistic meaning seems to make people uncomfortable in today's choral zeitgeist. But--as I've hopefully argued--that doesn't matter before they've been set to music. The words are just the beginning of the conversation.


This isn't to say that a poem is just an empty vessel for the composer to pour their experiences and identity into. All approaches to the music/text relationship are valid, and I've worked with many wonderful living poets with whom I've been able to discuss their work's (often concrete) meaning.


But (in our capitalistic times that are obsessed with "what specific meaning will the audience get from this work of art?") I think it's important to remember that the meaning of a piece of vocal music goes beyond the meaning of the words. Music itself can still enrich us by dredging up personal emotions and experiences and forcing us to confront the conflicts between them. Especially if those experiences are difficult to put into words... as unconvincing as that may be to the gatekeepers reading your grant proposal.

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