An Interview with Aaron J. Kirschner about his Teasdale Songs

On August 2nd, 2019, the Wayward Music series will present Songs from the Exotic, a unique song recital by vocalist Emily Ostrom and pianist Peter Nelson-King.  Four major song sets are presented along with miniature gems (and a world premiere by Yours Truly), and among those sets is the enchanting Four Love Songs of Sara Teasdale by Utah-based Aaron J. Kirschner.  Having earned degrees from the University of Iowa, Boston University and the University of Utah, Kirschner has won international success with his compositions and has established a firm place in the Salt Lake City music scene as a composer, clarinetist and theorist.  This performance of his Teasdale Songs is the Pacific Northwest premiere of the work, and to celebrate this I did a correspondence interview to get a closer look at these songs.

How did you come across Sara Teasdale's poetry?

While I've known Teadale's poetry for many years, the specific idea of setting it came about in 2015.  The soprano Elaina Robbins commissioned me to write a short, preferably bird-themed song, yet I struggled to find a suitable text.  While my wife was antique shopping in a small town in Wyoming, I came across a first edition of Teasdale's Pulitzer Prize winning Love Songs.  I happily added this wonderful collection to my library, and overnight the setting of "Swans" practically poured out; I had a complete sketch of the song before my wife woke up the next morning.  I knew then that I wanted to set more poems from the collection, yet had to set them aside as my engagements moved towards large-scale instrumental mediums - particularly my Oboe Concerto Symphony.  When I finally had a chance to return to vocal writing working with the baritone James Martin, I knew instinctively that I needed to work "Swans" into a larger cycle.

Teasdale's work, when she was in her peak of fame late in her life, was conservative compared to the poetry trends of her time, and many modern composers prefer to choose poetry for songs that is as "modernist" as the music they want to write.  How did you balance using "old-fashioned" poetry with modern compositional techniques?

To me, the most strikingly conservative feature of Teasdale's work (and Love Songs in particular) is the acceptance of female submissiveness in romantic relationships.  This stands in such stark contrast to much of today's poetry and art song, let alone public discourse, that I knew I could not ignore the interplay of the poetry's themes and the current socio-political climate.  It would not do to treat these poems as if I were writing in 1917, nor do I even think it is possible.  And yet, the beauty in the poems must be celebrated regardless of the context of 2019.  In many ways, this was one of the greatest challenges I have faced as a composer.  I did not want these songs to be an overt critique of conservative attitudes towards romantic relationships - many, both in 1917 and today, find personal happiness in such environments.  Rather, I wished to celebrate the beauty of Teasdale's poems, while structuring the music in such a way as to allow multiple readings of the overall message and story.  "Four Love Songs of Sara Teasdale" can be read as a celebration of both the message and verse, a subtly ironic setting (with the harmony pushing against the text in a way very much in contrast with the Romantic music it superficially resembles), or even as a religious allegory.  Even I, as the composer, am not sure which is correct, nor do I think they are mutually exclusive.

The structure forms a kind of mirror, with outer movements featuring dense, neo-romantic piano writing and inner movements relying on sparser content and atmosphere.  Did this concept come from the poems, or did you find poems to fit the content?

I'll be honest: I hate this question, as it presumes a false dichotomy of text-first versus structure-first attitudes towards vocal composition.  Unquestionably, the text drives the music; every note of my vocal writing is in deference to the text.  However, the most important factor to me was the overall emotional journey.  The outer two songs, as an affirmation of love and the peace of acceptance, naturally lend themselves to a different character than the middle two, which take aim at the more frustrating and emotionally draining issues of romance.  Thus, I feel that the "mirrored" structure arose naturally, with the music and text both in service of the larger narrative.

Have you considered other poets of Teasdale's time for art songs?

I've absolutely considered other poets of Teasdale's time, but only insofar as I will consider any poet or poem.  I am not generally concerned with the time period of the poets I choose.  I am looking for beautiful verse that music can defer to (this is much harder to find than it sounds!) and, at least in the case of my cycles, fits into the larger narrative arc.

When John Harbison arranged his Mirabai Songs for chamber ensemble after originally writing them for voice and piano, he stated that chamber songs were generally more successful at the time, and that art songs were a waning format.  This was more than 30 years ago.  Do you see voice and piano songs having a future, or at least one that is appealing to modernist composition?

I think there's a distinction that needs to be made between simply calling something "modern" music and actually calling something "Modernist".  At the risk of encouraging Adorno-ish jokes, much of what we call "modern" music is really older "Modernist" music - in 2019, we are legitimately seeing art created over a century ago still referred to as "modern art".  That said, to the question about piano/vocal art song versus chamber/vocal music...I see these as two distinct genres of music, both appealing to current composers.  Again, I go back to deference to the text.  Art song text differs from chamber/vocal text (and both differ again from opera); setting Teasdale is fundamentally different from setting Cummings.  Teasdale's projects much better into the art song genre, while Cummings's - at least in my experience - is much better set as chamber/vocal.  The text, not the instrumentation, is the motivation for vocal writing.  The appeal of the text drives vocal composition, and given the large variance of wonderful texts I see no reason that any of the genres of vocal music should wane in appeal as we continue in the 21st century.

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Songs from the Exotic is performed on August 2nd, 2019, at 8 pm in the Chapel Performance Space of the Good Shepherd Center in Seattle.  I hope to see you all there...

~PNK

An Interview with Carson Cooman about Ab and Pooh

On August 8th, 2019, Judson Scott and Peter Nelson-King (myself) will be mounting East Coast Meets West, a recital of late 20th-century/early 21st-century works for trumpet and piano, trumpet and voice, and piano solo.  The recital features three world premieres by myself, as well as a fourth premiere, A Song for Ab and Pooh by Carson Cooman.  Cooman is an extremely productive musician, the composer of more than 1000 pieces and a very active church organist, with a YouTube channel featuring first recordings of many dozens of modern organ compositions.  I came across A Song for Ab and Pooh, one of his compositions for trumpet and piano, on his website, offered up for free owing to its short length.  An aleatoric composition (meaning that it has major elements left to be determined by the performer(s)), the trumpet is given a solo a piacere, with optional piano accompaniment that has "cells" of material to be treated at the pianist's whim.  It's musical content intrigued me, as well as its strange title, and to find out more I reached out to Cooman.  He was kind enough to do a correspondence interview, and here is the result of those questions.

Aleatoric music is an occasional practice of yours rather than a constant - what draws you to the format?

"I'm always interested in exploring a wide variety of possible elements in the writing of music. I've written a lot of music, but I always strive to make there be at least something about each piece that is different from things I've written before. I have no interest in writing the same piece over and over again. And here in the early 21st century, we are at a time in history with an amazing panoply of techniques and elements that can be brought to bear and combined in one's own ways in compositions. For the realization of certain musical ideas and concepts, aleatoric elements are one tool to draw upon. I love some of the unexpected rhythmic coordination aspects that can only be achieved with such kinds of notation. And I have written pieces (like Lutosławski made brilliantly "mainstream") that integrate aleatoric and strictly notated elements.

Music that has aleatoric, open form, or improvisational elements has always felt like a normal possibility to me perhaps because my instrument as a performer is the organ, which is the only Western classical instrument that has a completely mainstream, and entirely unbroken, tradition of improvisation. For all other instruments, it's become a specialized or abnormal thing. One can get a typical conservatory training in many instruments without ever improvising anything."

Who are Ab and Pooh, and is that who the piece was written for in terms of performance?

"The "Ab and Pooh" of the title are small stuffed animals (an eagle and bear) that have been with me for a long time; in Pooh's case, literally since the day of my birth. They've figured in "family lore" and our imaginations since childhood, and my brother (to whom the piece is dedicated) still to this day draws calendars that feature illustrations of these two characters doing improbable things; we give these to family members at Christmas."

The disconnection between the trumpet and piano parts is intriguing.  Was the trumpet part written by itself first, or did you conceive of them at the same time?

"I wrote them together, though the trumpet line is notated in detail and the piano part is just a set of elements for the pianist to use. I wrote them out originally under each other on the paper, and as I was going along it seemed that the piano ideas wanted to remain "elements," rather than being made into a fixed, strict, rhythmic accompaniment."

How do you feel about trumpet and piano as a medium?

"My brother was a trumpet player, and I was accompanying him on the piano since the first week he took lessons. I wrote a lot of pieces for him, beginning with something for his first few months of study that used less than an octave of range. As he grew to be an advanced player and attend conservatory for college, so did the difficulty of the pieces I wrote for him. We gave many public performances together during the years that he was actively playing and spent countless hours playing privately. So the medium seems completely normal to me, and I know well its standard repertoire (as well as plenty of obscure things). We also did a lot of trumpet/organ music, which is of course also an effective genre."

You're an extremely prolific composer, with a personally-catalogued oeuvre totalling more than a thousand pieces, and you aren't even 40.  Was this a wise move?

"I think the only way it would be unwise is if I had an expectation that a performer or listener needed to engage with my entire output (or even a large portion of it.) I'm happy for people to engage with it in whatever way they want and to whatever extent they want. If they find one or two pieces that suit them, that's great. If they want to (as some have) delve into an extremely large number of them, that's fine too.

The notion that there is anything strange about writing a large number of pieces is, in my opinion, a very unfortunate "post-Romantic" inheritance that we are still stuck with today. In the pre-Romantic era, there was nothing at all unusual about somebody composing a large number of pieces.

I think each composer has a sort of musical metabolism and a speed of working that forms very early and is extremely unlikely to change. Some people write a lot of pieces, some people write very few. Some people write those pieces very quickly, other slowly. Some work quickly and then revise, others agonize over each measure along the way, etc.

The most cursory examination of music history shows there's no correlation between quality and either the number of pieces somebody writes or the time that they take to write any given piece. There are prolific composers who have written tons of excellent pieces, and there are composers who have written few works and none of them are very good. And vice versa. I remember the late Harold Shapero telling me that as a student he decided to go study with Paul Hindemith because "Hindemith was a fast, prolific composer, and I wanted to be really fast too." But in the course of that study Shapero realized that he'd always be a very slow composer. Their relative speeds were baked into both him and Hindemith from the start, and it wasn't something he was going to learn to change in lessons. And both Shapero and Hindemith wrote very high quality music.

Tangentially: there's also not necessarily a correlation between being a prolific composer (having a large catalog of compositions) and writing those pieces quickly. While this is certainly true in some cases, it's not necessarily the case. Vincent Persichetti said that people always commented on his being prolific and assumed that he must write quickly, but he always insisted that he wasn't actually that fast of a composer at all. He just wrote constantly. He taught at Juilliard for decades but lived his whole life in his native Philadelphia. For driving himself back and forth to New York from Philadelphia, he devised a kind of desk that he could put over the steering wheel of the car so that he could keep composing while driving. (It's amazing he died of lung cancer after a lifetime of smoking rather than a car accident.)"

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East Coast Meets West is presented as part of the Wayward Music Series.  Another interview is coming, and I'll see you then...

~PNK