Joan Heller, soprano, with Thomas Stumpf, piano
Due to a temporary compatibility with SMU's server, only Internet Explorer with
Real Player will allow you to listen to these audio clips. It should be fixed shortly (11/07/98)
-
for female voice
-
for high voice and piano
-
for two superimposed voices
-
for soprano and tape
-
for soprano and piano
This project has been supported by a grant from the
National Endowment for the Arts.
Illustration by Jeff Cornell
-
My purpose in titling this collection "To the Verge" is to suggest
a context for hearing and appreciating this music. Aiken's "verge" is a
dangerous precipice above "the dark kingdom" - that vantage point from
which our rational minds can view our darker natures. On the verge, we
must look down into a noisy eddy in which our obsessions, failures, and
fears are tumbled together in irreconcilable contradictions. If we want
to grow mentally and spiritually, we must come "to the verge." Saint
Paul
saw us "looking through a glass darkly but now face to face" as a
result
of our verge experience. Some visitors to the verge inevitably go mad.
Most of us, fortunately, use our visit as an opportunity to integrate
who
we think we are with who we truly are. We come away from the verge with
a more accurate sense of self. We become connected to our own song; we
discover our own voice.
Luciano Berio's Sequenza III with its kaleidoscope of sounds and emotions, suggests a personality teetering on the edge of the verge, ultimately focusing the chaos into order. In Phonemena Milton Babbitt forges a powerful emotional unity from an abyss of numerical possibilities. Robert Cogan's Polyutterances creates a world in which emotion and information, coming from every possible source and direction, must be organized into meaning and given a single voice. At the heart of Thomas Stumpf's Lear's Daughters is the belief that the artist, in the act of creating, has a unique ability to synthesize contradictory thoughts, emotions and actions. Charles Fussell's Goethe Songs reveal two sides of Goethe's spirit - his younger self, the playful and optimistic Cupbearer, and his older self, the pompous and world-weary Poet - reconciled in an atmosphere of love and health.
All of the compositions included on this disc represent a visit "to the verge" both in theme and form, but it is up to the performer to "broadcast live" from the precarious precipice. No music requires more of the singer. The emotional complexity and musical variety demanded by each piece force the performer to explore territory far beyond that of more conventional vocal music. The extremes of range, the sophisticated intervals, the irregular rhythms and the need for a truthful connection to the shifting drama must all come together in beautiful singing. The singer of this music must have the courage to go "to the verge" and the technical artistry to report back in a meaningful voice.
Will Graham
- Luciano Berio: Sequenza III
-
Berio's Sequenza III for solo soprano, composed in 1966, is one of
a series of musical sequences designed to extend the expressive
boundaries
of the soloist. This eight-minute aria, which can be performed only by
a singer with the most sophisticated vocal techniques, calls for long
held
notes, extremes of range, whispering, stammering, fierce cries and
articulated
babbling in an emotionally complex but highly detailed musical
structure.
Constructed in ten-second sequences, marked in the score with a series
of alternating expression marks, this music requires that the singer
project
forty-four rapidly shifting emotions with a masterful control of breath
and imagination. The transitions between spoken and sung elements,
conceived
as natural and imperceptible, confirm one of Berio's philosophical
tenets.
Words, music and emotion need not exist in parallel lines as in
conventional
vocal music. When they are combined into one gesture, the result is an
even more direct expression of the human condition.
Will Graham
- Charles Fussell: Goethe Lieder
-
The cycle of five Goethe songs began as a single song for an all-Goethe
recital by Joan Heller. The series of Cupbearer verses belongs to a
collection
The East-West Divan (divan simply meaning collection) which Goethe
wrote
in his middle age while under the influence of Persian poetry. The
grouping
is my own and tells a story from the morning when the Poet wakes up
with
a hangover, quickly cured by the Cupbearer, to a midnight revelation of
oneness with the universe, a sense of well-being, and of night giving
way
to sleep. Between this red-eyed awakening and evening, Goethe allows
his
wise child to poke sly fun at the 'great poet' (Goethe himself, of
course)
and his pompous renown in the marketplace. In fact, through his love
and
devotion, the Cupbearer cures a middle-aged melancholy. I think it not
too psychological to see Goethe face to face with his own young self.
The
musical setting makes no attempt to evoke a Germanic style. Goethe's
voice
is universal, not tied to the Northern European expressionism of the
20th
century. Thus, it is subject, I trust, to international interpretation.
I have therefore given these poems as simple and direct a voice as I
could.
Charles Fussell
- Robert Cogan: Polyutterances
-
We live at the vortex of changing, unexpected personal, global, and
historical messages from near and far, trying to make meaningful
contact
with them. It is this experience that Utterances, in its various forms,
seeks to evoke. Utterances is an open-ended folio for voice whose
evolution
began in 1977. Its score is a set of such messages; it can be performed
by a single solo voice, or by superimposed voices, pre-recorded or
live.
In this latter form it is called Polyutterances.
The open-ended folios that began with Utterances have several characteristics: the composer can continually add to them, hence they are never complete; and performers, by selecting pages for a performance and ordering them, as well as by making crucial musical choices within the pages, take on the role of co-creator. The folios take on features of the collage, the mobile, and the improvisation; every performance will be substantially different. The first performer to assume this expanded role in my music was Joan Heller, for whom Utterances/Polyutterances was written. She has recorded Utterances on Spectrum and Neuma labels; has performed it throughout the United States and Europe; and has actively participated in creating many of its various versions. In this recording she sings both tracks.
Robert Cogan
- Milton Babbitt: Phonemena
-
Combining an ear for vocal and instrumental color with an aptitude
for numerical possibility, Milton Babbitt expanded Schoenberg's
twelve-tone
system to include twelve different note values, twelve different
intervals
between instrumental entrances and twelve different instrumental
timbres.
Using this theory of composition called "combinatoriality," Babbitt has
produced music of startlingly emotional as well as mathematical
complexity.
Phonemena is an example of this principle. The singer is given specific
phonemes (24 consonants and 12 vowels), which are treated as are the
pitches,
rhythms, intervals and timbres, with "combinatoriality." The result is
a virtuostic aria, a challenge for both the singer and the listener.
Will Graham
- Thomas Stumpf: Lear's Daughters
-
Ever since I read Sybil, the idea of multiple personalities has
fascinated
me. Do we not all house a number of widely divergent personalities
within
our souls? Are great works of the theater, whether drama or opera, not
externalizations of different personalities within their creator? Does
the art-work reintegrate those personalities and fuse them into a
"healthy"
whole for the creator, as Sybil's psychiatrist was apparently able to
do
for her? I have tried to fuse a part of Shakespeare's King Lear back
together
by turning the three daughters Goneril, Regan and Cordelia into one.
Their
music is individually differentiated - Goneril was conceived as a
dramatic
soprano, Regan as a coloratura, Cordelia as a lyric mezzo - but with
thematic
relationships and cross-references, and the work must be sung by one
singer.
The text is adapted not only from the daughters' own words but from
comments
made about them by others, here transformed into self-revelation (in
some
cases self-accusation). The resulting increase in emotional range
intends
the three personalities to become aspects of Everywoman.
The cycle, in three sections, was written very specifically for the extraordinary vocal and dramatic abilities of Joan Heller. She premiered it in Boston in September 1990 (barely a week after its completion) and performed it shortly thereafter in Moscow and Saint Petersburg; since then, she has also sung it in New York and Indianapolis. It is intended to become part of the musical theatre piece Dark Lady, which received the Kahn Award at Boston University in 1992.
Thomas Stumpf
-
Return to Joan Heller's Homepage.