Birtwistle

Birtwistle has 9 Niedecker settings. That's all I've found so far. I also see a reference to a Jerry Hui who has done some. I won't be listening to many those until I get my own work done. I haven't heard of him before now, and it's funny that it's a Brit who's approached this poetry.

Little Drops of Rest

Here are the first three settings, minus vocal parts. I have one more poem to set to music, and then I have to compose the interludes between them. 

The songs have to set a single mood, but have some varied movement in melody. I repeat some chords in the ii-V-I cadences, but I think I'm getting the effects I'm looking for.  

Why Niedecker?

I don't know quite why I chose Lorine Niedecker to set to music.  Her book was on my desk... But I must have been the one who put it there, and for some purpose. To set something to music, I must feel there is nothing that I would change about the lyric, that everything in it is something that I can stand behind, in some sense. It seems like an act of conferring value on a text, setting it apart from others.

I chose the poems almost at random, by opening the book to a random page until I found something that suited my needs. Not every poem was suitable but it wasn't hard to find good ones.

I like the idea of combining poems that have no connection to one another. That creates a new work of art through new juxtapositions.

I am trying to put myself in the place of a composer, so that as I continue to write my book on music and Lorca, I have some insight. I don't say that out of arrogance, but precisely out of humility. I don't know what that process is at all until I try it. My claim, which I have no way of demonstrating, is that the creative process of the mediocre hobbyist composer is not wholly dissimilar to that of good ones.

Of course, I could set Lorca himself, and I have done that, but I wanted this project to be something independent of the book.

So Niedecker is one of the poets who exemplifies my Platonic ideal of lyric poetry in my own idiom. Ceravolo would be another.  

Coltrane changes

So I'm exploring these chord changes.  The idea is to go down tonal centers by major thirds. So play a  "ii V I" in A, then in F, then in Db.  Down another third gets you to A again, so it's cyclical. Typically, played very fast, as in "Giant Steps."  My idea is to slow it down and make that the structure itself, take just one part of it as the intro to a piece with a different set of chord changes. Here I go

G- / C7 / F // Eb- / D7 / Db...   Then my setting of two Niedecker poems---eventually to be 4. As usual, please excuse the singing and the various stumbles.  I didn't have time to record it over and over until it was free from those.

The Perfect Lyric

My aesthetic is that of the perfect, self-contained lyric. Not in the "bad poetry," of course.  And it's something I've probably never achieved in poems trying to be good, either. I know many people advocate for the messy aesthetic, but I like the sharp image in the poetic form that seems to incarnate that image.

Sunday's motor-cars
jar the house.
When I'm away on work-days
hear the rose-breast.
Love the night, love the night
and if on waking it rains:
little drops of rest.

L.N.




That will be the fourth poem in the Niedecker suite in Db.  I will have five piano segments framing the four songs, an intro, a conclusion, and three interludes.

 

Yet more

I wrote a tune for the second Niedecker.  I think it will be a suite of 3 or 4 songs. I need one a little longer now:

They've lost their leaves
the maples along the river
but the weeping willow still
        hangs green

and the old cracked boat-hulk
mud-sunk
         grows weeds

year after year

Another Niedecker

I sit in my own house
secure,
follow winter break-up
thru window glass.
Ice cakes
glide downstream
the wild swans
of our day.

She is so good it puts me to shame for calling myself a poet. The challenge here in musical setting is finding longer melodic lines when the phrases are so short. I'm seeing four phrases.  I need an instrumental interlude between the two halves of the poem. The vowel sounds make it very singable, especially the sounds of "ice cakes / glide downstream."  The ending fades away rather than being resolute or emphatic. These are not Yeats's wild swans.

***

Update:

The division between inside and out: the speaker is in the security (comfort, safety) or her own house, looking out the window. "Winter break-up" sounds negative at first, like the break-up of a relationship, but it is winter itself breaking up, exemplified by the frozen-over river ice breaking up into smaller fragments, "cake." {Solvitur acris hiems] Gliding downstream is a smooth movement; they are white so they remind her of swans, perhaps of Yeats's poem. In "our day," our times, we are content with more humble images of beauty, not the typical swans of symbolist poetry. So emotionally the poem is in tension, with the various elements: security, coldness thawing out, cakes [something nice to eat in other contexts], beauty, and humility. You wouldn't set it to music as a triumphant anthem or as a dirge, but as a nuanced exploration of these emotional tensions.

Second update:  "ice cakes float down stream" is four long vowels in a row. Exploit parallelisms with winter / window.

You are my friend

Here is my version of the Niedecker poem.  Excuse the singing voice!  I wasn't warmed up very well. 

Niedecker

"You are my friend-- / you bring me peaches / and the high bush cranberry / you carry / my fishpole // you water my worms / you patch my boot / with your mending kit / nothing in it / but my hand."

Here's a nice poem. I want to set it to music so first I must think it through a bit. It starts off with a kind of ordinary line. Everything else in the poem explains that friendship.  Gifts of fruit first. I didn't know before 10 seconds ago that cranberry bushes were tall, but I've just found out they grow to be 10-15'.  We don't expect that line to be so long, but the details get more specific as we go along. The alliteration of water and worms is a nice touch of humor there. I don't fish but I guess you keep the bait wet so they are still alive when you put them on the hook.  

There is a shift to a faster rhythm.  Now the gifts are of service, not edible objects. A narrative emerges of the images: the speaker, if she is a woman, is going fishing with another person (possibly male?).  He is carrying to gear, including hers, then doing more specific things. There is a slight hiccup syntactically in the last two lines: "nothing in it" would refer to the kit, but that doesn't make sense, so it must be the boot. Now the hand, not the foot is in there: we get the image of her holding the boot steady by putting her hand in it while he is putting a patch onto it.  "Nothing in it but my foot" wouldn't be a satisfying conclusion.

That specificity has an emotional charge to it. It is a love poem, but expresses love as gratitude for friendship, small acts of comradeship by which he shows his affection for her. The music has to express the tone of that old song "P.S. I love you" or something like that. It has got to expand and contract in the length of phrases and be somewhat understated, not too Norman Rockwell.

PS:  I just saw an online lecture / discussion of the poem where the professor and the class do not consider the possibility that the "it" can be the boot itself. They go into this long discussion of meta poetry and masturbation.  How can the "it' be the mending kit? Did all its contents (thread, needles, patches, glue...) spill out of it? Why would her hand be in it if he is the mender?