Notes by the composer

Spoon River Songs
Spoon River Songs is an ongoing project. The first and third songs were commissioned in 1987 by Dr. Nikki Martin, and premièred in 1988 in CAMI Hall in New York by the Conservatory Cantata Singers, who I accompanied at the keyboard. The middle song was commissioned by Katherine Growdon in 2004. Presently, I am completing four more songs for Susanne Mentzer to add to the cycle.
Edgar Lee Masters’ poems, which comprise his Spoon River Anthology, were published in 1914. Masters was a physician who became deeply interested in the history of the Midwest, and particularly of central Illinois. There is a huge cemetery beside Illinois’ Spoon River, in which Masters would spend large amounts of time poring over the names and epitaphs on the innumerable tombstones. Using a mixture of fact gleaned from research and his own imagination, he wrote the eponymous poems as if each dead person were speaking about his or her life. There exists in the anthology an amazing wealth of poignancy, sorrow, joy, and many other human emotions, all springing from the traditions of early Americana.
These three poems, “Fiddler Jones”, “Charles Webster” and “Lucinda Matlock”, contain much contrast: Jones has “fiddled away” his life, hardly working on his farm, and instead substituting the joys of music and wandering for hard labor. Lucinda Matlock, on the other hand, rejoices because her life has been filled with so much work. Charles Webster defines himself through the countryside of his home rather than the particulars of his life, although the image that he leaves us with at the end of the poem is perhaps the most personal of the whole set. All three characters exhibit the indomitable “American” spirit, and hold no regrets for their different lives.
I have used many straight-ahead bumptious Bluegrass idioms in my setting of “Fiddler Jones”. “Charles Webster” is an expressionistic exploration of an evening walk through the country, and “Lucinda Matlock” contains a sort of Martha Graham-like lightness, with many shifting metrical patterns.

Viñetas Flamencas
Federico García Lorca wrote the six poems titled Viñetas Flamencas (= Flamenco vignettes) in the 1920’s, and included them in his book, Poema del Canto Jondo (= Poem of the Deep Song), in 1931. Canto Jondo was the term used to describe flamenco music, specifically the singing, which reached its peak in the 1880’s. By the early 20th century, however, political changes in Spain led many of Spain’s foremost writers, poets and musicians to fear that the art-form was disappearing.
García Lorca wrote: “The artistic treasure of an entire race is on the road to oblivion… Old men are taking to the grave priceless treasures of past generations…”. He and the composer Manuel de Falla had intended to found a Café Cantante (Flamenco Café), but instead created an annual competition in Seville.
Viñetas Flamencas is the third Spanish song-cycle that I am pleased to have written for Mark Hernandez, and the fourth that he has premièred. Ever since he commissioned me to set García Lorca’s Six Caprices when he was still a student at the Conservatory, we have enjoyed working together immensely.
In 2000, Mark and Esther Landau of Citywinds asked me to set the Viñetas for wind quintet, tenor and piano. Each of the six poems in the work represents a different aspect of the flamenco milieu: Three of the poems pay homage to three flamenco musicians: Silverio Franconetti, Juan Breva and La Parrala. The other three likewise evoke other aspects of the smoky, thick atmosphere of the heart of Andalusian Spain. I have used various flamenco forms for the music, as well as aspects of the cancione that Mark makes a specialty. The addition of the piano makes many of the idioms of the flamenco guitar audible within the orchestration. Much of my music contains Latin influences, and this work is a quintessential example of my style of writing.
Viñetas Flamencas will transport the listener back to those turn-of-the-century days in Spain, with the smoke-filled taverns, green glass mirrors, the swaying skirts of the dancers, the grito terrible (terrible cries) of the singers, and the orange groves and plains of Andalusia.

Fireflies and Willows
It was a great honor and delight to be asked by Professor Kunio Saura to set the beautiful poems of the Masters Nakajima and Nozaki to music. The intimacy of their poetry lends itself perfectly to the medium of the art-song. The delicate imagery and seeming “un-connectedness” of the poems in each group urged me to find a harmonic and melodic language – common perceptual “threads”, as it were, which would bind the images into a single coherent structure. Another resulting challenge was that the “usual” classical form, in which there is a return to the original thematic material, was unsuitable for these poems, which contain a “one-way” journey from one emotional place to another: any recapitulation would weaken the effect of being “elsewhere” – of being in a different place, physically or emotionally, at the end. Therefore, the form of the songs became “through-composed” – that is, the order of the emotional states of the poems dictated the structure of the music.
For the imagery, I developed a musical language of bird-songs, water, wind, and other elements of nature, intertwined with the Japanese classical scales, which I find particularly beautiful, and other pentatonic harmonies. The rhythms are never very far from those of dance, which is a common characteristic of all my music. Although there is some “impressionistic” text-painting, as with the frogs in Nakajima’s An old pond, or the “pure crystal waters” in the third haiku by Nozaki, there is also a good deal of “expressionism”: that is, depiction of emotions evoked by the images, rather than the images themselves. There is much of this in the first Nakajima song, as well as the second and fifth Nozaki haiku. I am very happy with the results, and very honored to have these pieces performed by such outstanding musicians.

Phenomenal Woman
Phenomenal Woman is a set of seven songs for solo voice and piano, written to poems by Maya Angelou. Soprano Kathleen Sisco commissioned this work from me and also gave the première in 2004. Angelou’s poetry, with its built-in fluidity of rhythm and cadence, ever lends itself to musical settings. These seven poems embody the poet’s deep compassion and her faith in the indomitable human spirit as expressed in the feminine.
I have departed from my usual highly interrelated form in this set, which is not so much a “cycle” as a group of cabaret songs, each one independent of its fellows. Also, I have greatly varied the style from song to song: jazz, blues, rock and roll, and musical theater are all present. And, as with much of my music, the music stretches the technical abilities of both classical and pop musicians, borrowing equally as it does from both idioms.

David Garner, composer

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