Nola Firth's first collection of poetry is titled "Even if the Sun" (2013). Nola and I sang (until recently when she shifted to NSW) in the same choir The Gisborne Singers. After hearing Nola perform some of her poems, and really enjoying them (I am not a complete poem-hound so they must be good!), I decided to set one. I picked the title piece of the above collection, because of the powerful imagery and metaphor. This poem is about achieving the perfect state of Zen meditation, and even if the sun rose in the west, you would still not be distracted. The sea is a metaphor for the meditative state.
Nola's poem is very free form (see below). It also has thought threads that extend over several lines and these presented a number of challenges in setting it to some musical structures. In the end, the first and second stanzas re-use the same music, mainly. The second stanza also gets some extra material (the coloured fish). The third stanza I treated more like a coda. It reused the new idea in the second stanza, as well as including some other material. Throughout this work I made use of the whole tone scale to generate a 'floaty' feeling that I thought would suit the text - the first motif of the first and second stanzas use the whole tone scale. It also returns in the last part of the coda. The original text does not repeat any words; this was a musical device.
Here are the notes as a pdf. I performed this piece with Brad Dean (voice), also from the Gisborne Singers, at the 2015 Christmas party. Nola read the poem immediately before us, so the audience had 2 chances to absorb it :-)
I dive under the still surface
pay homage there,
perhaps for days,
to the door dogs
Sleep and Boredom.
Then a green translucent silence
engulfs me,
depth shields me,
in a flow rich and thick with time.
Sounds enter there.
The wind is its waves.
The clash of the kitchen dishes,
a sigh of the person sitting next to me,
are coloured fish
I watch as they steadily pass by.
Mind knots, nudged,
nourished, by birdsong and passing thoughts
slowly unravel
into free waving seaweed.
On and on it flows.
And I know
this sea is elemental,
and cannot be disturbed even if the sun were to rise from the west.
Spike Milligan is known best as a humourist; single handedly he wrote most of the Goons scripts. Amongst his vast output of material are quite a lot of poems. A lot of them are very silly, but there are also some exquisitely beautiful ones. I have set five poems, with a range of Milligan's writing represented. They are set for a mixture of SATB choir and voice and piano. The pieces are listed in what could be a performance order if all 5 were performed.
This one just has two parts, high and low. The idea is that the people singing the low part are extremely impressed with their operatic-style singing. The people singing the high part are mocking the low parters. Should be hammed up. Originally the end was a little more unexpected.
Here are the notes as pdf and the midi.
Milligan explains our night-time fears. A gentle and consanant waltz for SATB choir. I finally extended it in 2011 to add a bridge and recapitulate the first verse.
Here are the notes as pdf and the midi.
Here is a performance by the Gisborne Singers.
Milligan suffered some horrendous experiences in World War II. This, his first serious poem, was written after burying the dead following a direct hit on his battery that left only two survivors. The text is so moving and beautifully crafted; it is also unrepentantly bleak.
I set this for tenor solo, SATB choir and piano. This piece went through many transformations. The first version was in 6/8 which I rather liked. However, I needed to allow the listener time to digest the words, and in spreading it out, adding 'listening' space and other changes, I moved it all to 4/4.
Here are the notes as a pdf and the midi.
Here also is a performance, in 2008, from my choir "Resonance" (at least I used to sing in it). Geoff Nelson is the soloist and I am playing the piano. We had just managed to get it ready for performance. Some of it is a bit untidy, we left out the split Alto parts, and some of it is gorgeous. I was happy with it for a first performance and the audience reacted very positively. Unfortunately, Resonance has disbanded now; in fact this was our last concert.
Here is a performance by the Gisborne Singers in 2015.
I wrote this a little while after Resonance disbanded. Perhaps that is why I did not set it for choir. However, somehow the words and melody just said voice and piano to me. So I set it for tenor and piano. Many of Milligan's more serious poems have a barb in them and this is no exception!
The melody that I wrote is "modal". So this piece does not follow conventional functional harmony. You really can't find a tonic key for it. The tonic note is F, but the piece is neither in F major nor F minor. The introduction gives some small tastes of the melodic and harmonic material to come, hoping to prepare the ears.
Here are the notes as a pdf and the midi.
Here is me warbling at home with my digital piano..
This is a very funny and very clever poem. I wanted to write something a little longer, so I wrote most of the words for the second Tango-like verse. My words are not as good as Milligan's, and he would never have written them. I probably need to revise them, but they are ok for a first pass.
I set this for SATB choir. It is a rather complicated and difficult setting. It has multiple simultaneous melodies, dissonance, rythm and word clashes, and some difficult melodic lines.
Here are the notes as a pdf and the midi.
This is a little piece that I wrote for Ri, who was just starting to learn to play the guitar (so it is deliberately simple). Ri makes beautiful ceramic works, the creation of which she refers to as "Playing Wiv Clay". Originally it just had a couple of verses, heading off to the bank rather quickly and ambitiously. I added a couple more verses a few months later. The new interlude (third verse) has half decent music and lyrics, which, shall we say, "contrasts" with the nursery rhyme tune elsewhere. Unfortunately, this took me away from simple I, IV and V chords. Oh well, she has to learn the harder ones sometime, right? Well maybe not, so there is a second version where Verse 3 uses less exotic chords.
Here is the first (harder) version with the pdf and midi.
Here is the second (easier) version with the pdf and midi.
I wrote this piece initially in 2003 (and revised it in 2005/2006) as I reflected on the loss of my friend Becky Elson in 1999.
Becky was a fine poet as well as a talented astronomer; her poetry was her lifeline throughout much of her professional scientific career. The words in this song are hers, mostly jotted down in her notebook (on April 29) just a couple of weeks before she died. They are not particularly representative of her poetry, nor are they amongst her best work. They do reveal some of what she was thinking and feeling and as such gave me the material I needed to work with.
Here are the notes as a pdf and the midi file
The setting is for soprano, mezzo, alto and cello. The music should be interpreted reflectively, transparently, compassionately, but never tragically.
I was fortunate to achieve a studio recording of these piece in August 2015. The actual (audio only) recording is owned by 3MBS so I can't post it here. However, I can post a rehearsal recording and a video of one of the takes during the actual recording session that I made. The recording features Cristina Russo (soprano, right), Lotte Betts-Deane (mezzo, second from right), Anna Plotka (alto, third from right) and Alvin Wong (cello). For the rehearsal recording, it was a very cold morning, and there was all sorts of street noise, but this is a fine performance. I'd particularly like to thank Lotte for enagaging with me (we met via the Gisborne Singers, the choir that I sing in, and with which she performed occaisionally) on this project and staying the course when it all got very difficult and busy (we recorded a few days before Lotte headed overseas to live in the UK). I was also delighted that Cristina, whom I had worked with in an earlier attempt to record this, returned to sing the soprano part.
If you are interested in the studio audio recording I can provide for personal use only.
Thanks to Stuart Greenbaum for helping me rework the cello part for this piece. It was terribly stuck in a kind of default arpeggiated 1-bar phrase layout which was pretty ordinary. Stuart helped me get past the fact that it was already written down, and write it down again, but differently and better.
I made a setting of the Tolkien poem (from 'The Fellowship of the Ring') setting; I called it 'Nimrodel'. The present key suits a baritone. A soprano could sing it one octave higher ok.
I chose this poem, which is very long, because it required greater expressive range than I had managed before. I had a lot of bother with the middle section (sinking ships and storms) for a long time before hitting on something I think works ok - contrasting calm with the storm - when i went back to it in 2003. I was re-inspired after seeing the films to work on this piece (which I started before the first film came out).
In the book this poem is sung by Legolas. It's about an elven maiden called 'Nimrodel', also the name of a river near where she lived. Actually, only the first half is about Nimrodel. Thereafter it's about another Elf called Amroth, who it seems was yearning for Nimrodel.
I discarded one verse from the poem, the fourth to last in the original, which is descriptive, not narrative. It was getting horribly in the way for me to bring the piece to a satisfactory conclusion so I dropped it (but the music turned up later as the introduction). The emotional climax is the third to last verse. Here I have reused the harmonic structure (with some variation) and introduction from the 'calm' sections before the storm bits, wandered off into another key, slowed it down and spread the new melody out over twice as many bars as I had previously been doing. I'm rather partial to this section of the piece.
The last two verses I have treated as a Coda, reusing, in reverse, the music of the first two verses. The last three chords are the same as the last three chords of Liszt's B Minor sonata, which I am very pleased about ! I think I had written the first two chords, and was wondering whether to finish in the tonic or somewhere else, when i realized this was the same progression as Liszt's piece. Not only that, we were even in the same key; so Liszt it was for the last ambiguous chord.
Here are the notes as a pdf and a performance with Bruce Daniel (baritone) and myself at the piano. We weren't planning on recording this, but we were in the studio for my Yeats pieces (below) and just decided to do it - pretty good for no specific rehearsing! It changed a bit since that recording also.
I made a setting (medium voice) of a poem about the Riders of Rohan by J.R.R. Tolkien. It's from the Lord of the Rings ('The Two Towers'). Amusingly, when the film came out, this poem was spoken by King Theoden after the death of his son. In the book, Aragorn recites it.
Dawn Nettheim helped me turn the original harmony into something more interesting; it was terribly stuck in F major for a while.
Here are the notes as a pdf and a performance with Bruce Daniel (baritone) and myself at the piano.
Here are settings, for baritone, of some Yeats poems. Thanks to Helen Sim for providing me with a collection of Yeats' poems to pick from, to Trevor Pearce for suggesting 'When You are Old' needed some 'space' in it, to Bruce Daniel for help with scansion and tessitura, and to Corky Sablinsky for her usual constructive insights into the details. All of the pieces have benefited from this joint scrutiny.
This is the only one of the three settings in a minor key and it keeps to the natural minor. Originally it flirted with the harmonic minor in the link between verses, and at the end, but Corky convinced me to remove that (jangled her ears !). It's a bit grim, but the more I read it the more beautiful I find it. This poem was written about somebody he knew who was shot down in World War I. Yeats mused the man would have been thinking along these lines as he languished as a prisoner.
The second strain in this piece is a bit funny; it goes all Scottish on me when the Kiltartan cross comes along. I'd rather it went all Irish, but don't rightly know how to make it sound Irish.
Here are the notes as a pdf and a performance from Bruce Daniel and myself.
The words in 'The Song of Wandering Aengus' seem to me to reflect someone a bit muddled but happy all the same. So I felt a fairly simple folk-song style would be appropriate. I managed to largely resist seventh chords until I wrote the introductory bars. Originally, all verses had the same tune and accompaniment. However, the first time I played it with a singer (Bruce above), I was distinctly bored part way into the second verse. So the second verse got a new tune and a contrasting piano part.
You don't get much space for breathing in this piece. It's also a little high in general in the baritone's tessitura so you might find it a bit of a struggle. If so, you may also like to drop the first of the two quavers that often starts the next two-bar phrase if you are going a funny colour.
Here are the notes as a pdf and a performance from Bruce Daniel and myself.
'When You Are Old' is a beautiful poem about the elusiveness of love. The words are deeply personal and I tried to make rich and warm music for them. The basic melodic idea comes from a piano piece I was fiddling about with. It was a sort of cheap 'Film Music' concoction. The middle section of it is where the opening bars come from. I think it's much better here !
The melody and harmony is varied in the second verse and then largely returns to the form of verse 1 for verse 3; art song style. I struggled for months to write an accompaniment for this having played a 'default' accompaniment too many times when singing along to myself. I finally managed to finish it after the other two pieces were done.
The melodic line is often tied across the bar into a gentle dissonance. This device was largely to prevent the melodic phrases from being too short.
When I revised this piece in 2002, I added the recapitulative interlude between verses 1 and 2. At the same time, I also extended the ending slightly to finish in a different key rather than the tonic.
Here are the notes as a pdf and a performance from Bruce Daniel and myself. Here is a version as a pdf where the melody for the second verse is varied to not go below middle Csharp.
Youngest niece Lexi also got the treatement. Here is a waltz written for her when she was also five. The lyric and style are rather sacharine which is not really like Lexi at all. I can't imagine what got into me.
Here are the notes as a pdf and the midi.
Copyright Information - I have permission from the author, Mies Bouhuys, to use the texts set in the following songs..
During my time learning some Dutch, I encountered the work of the poet and author, Mies Bouhuys. I set three of her children's poems for medium-high voice. I met Mevrouw Bouhuys in 2002, and we agreed that she would find me three more poems to set and then we woud publish them together. Since that time, Mevrouw Bouhuys has passed away so these are all I will set.
The poems I have set are "Paardje" (Little Horse), Met z'n drieen" (We Three Together) and "Zwemmen" (Swimming). My favourite of these is Zwemmen, a rather gentle waltz.
I have included English translations of the lyrics in the sheet music. However, the translations fall rather short of the originals. I have not been able to preserve much of the rhyming that Mevrouw Bouhuys does so effortlessly in Dutch. Also, she makes use of the common Dutch diminutive ending "-je" which does not translate well if at all in English. For example, Paardje is an affectionate term for a pony, but "pony" would be horrible as the translation. Therefore in Paardje I leave it as Paardje ! Also in Met Z'n Drieen, the words vewaaid and verdoord are rather hard to translate. Any native Dutch speakers that read this, I'm accepting translation improvements !
Here are the notes as a pdf for Paardje, Met z'n Drieen and Zwemmen.
Here are the midis for Paardje, Met z'n Drieen and Zwemmen.
My sister and I used to (still do) annoy my oldest niece (Sophie Rose) by calling her anything but her actual name. Hence this piece written when she was about 5 called "My Name is Sophie Rose". It's deliberately very simple so a child could sing it, but as yet, she show no signs of doing so ! She also used to have some twubble with her 'Rs'.
Here are the notes as a pdf and the midi. Sophie was learning the tenor sax, so the vocal line is given to that instrument.