SCHORR Flowers (Four Poems by Cynthia Zarin)1,6. Morning (After) Commute2,5. French Novel3,4. In the Apartment, After You’ve Gone1,6. Elegy for a Small Town Psychic2,5. Liquid3,4. After All These Years2,5. Mother 1–6 • 1Eve Gigliotti (mez); 2Jesse Darden (ten); 3Michael Kelly (bar); 4Cris Frisco, 5Eric Schorr, 6Erika Switzer (pn); 19 Mercer Ens • ALBANY 1899 (44:44 )

New York Pretending to be Paris: Songs of Remembrance and Desire spotlights composer Eric Schorr. The music of Eric Schorr, a graduate of Yale and Harvard Universities, encompasses the genres of art song, theater, television, and film. New York Pretending to be Paris (also the title of the final song in Schorr’s cycle Mother) features settings of various poets Schorr discovered during his quest to find verse suitable for musical adaptation. In the CD booklet, Schorr describes that extensive search, and the kinds of poets/poetry he finds most suitable for song settings. Schorr describes his songs as “always lyrical,” and the writing most certainly reflects the composer’s experience in the musical theater. The songs are brimming with melody that is both accessible and captivating. And Schorr demonstrates a willingness to explore a wide range of styles in order to do justice to the poetry; as he puts it, “the music veers from Romantic to jazz to chanson to bossa nova.” The repertoire on New York Pretending to be Paris, originally scored for voice and piano, is presented in arrangements for a chamber ensemble comprising all four instrument families. Those orchestrations are unfailingly lovely and transparent, always complementing (and never interfering with) the singer and his or her narrative.

In New York Pretending to be Paris, the affinity between the various poets and composer is clear. Schorr has chosen poems that tell the stories of people in a wide range of experiences. Sometimes, the characters react in unexpected, striking ways. Two such instances occur in the song cycle Mother. Both are settings of poems by Susan Kinsolving. In “Under House Arrest,” a mother abandons (for a time) her newborn in a deserted field. In “Remodeling,” a wife who has learned of her husband’s adultery takes a sledgehammer, crowbar, and a pickaxe to the family’s idyllic 1950s suburban home and car. In both cases, poet Kinsolving and composer Schorr present their subjects in a non-judgmental fashion. These women act, and the reader/listener is given the freedom to apply his own response and judgment. The same holds true for Elegy for a Small Town Psychic (poem by Morri Creech). Both the departed “Clairvoyant Mabel” and the (probably duped) clients she left behind are depicted not as caricatures, but as human beings, worthy of empathy (and perhaps affection), rather than disdain. There is another aspect of Schorr’s musical settings I greatly admire. Many of the poems describe situations that, for the reader, may seem at first blush quotidian and unremarkable. But for the poem’s narrator, the situations occupy a place of great significance. Schorr embraces the opportunity to depict musically the narrator’s profound emotional responses to instances of daily life. Schorr’s music never strikes me as disproportionate. Quite the contrary, it is affecting and brimming with humanity. Puccini was a master of this approach, and Schorr’s songs are a worthy successor to that tradition.

Mezzo Eve Gigliotti, tenor Jesse Darden, and baritone Michael Kelly bring attractive lyric voices, style, dramatic commitment, and admirable diction to their interpretations. The chamber 19 Mercer Ensemble plays exquisitely. The recorded sound is excellent. The booklet includes the composer’s eloquent and illuminating program notes, and complete texts. This is a captivating disc. Ken Meltzer

 

Interview with Composer Eric Schorr
By Ken Meltzer

Your liner notes for New York Pretending to be Paris open with the following: “My journey began several years ago, when I began to read what would turn out to be many hundreds of contemporary poems with an eye (and ear) toward selecting just a few to turn into art songs.” Did this process begin as the result of commission(s), or was it the product of your own initiative?

It was my own idea. Commissioned works can come with strings attached—both figuratively and literally—when it comes to subject matter, tessitura, style or even duration. For this project I wanted complete freedom to choose the material I would work with, as well as the genre of music I would deem most suitable to it.

Tell us a bit about this long-term exploration of contemporary poetry.

My interest in poetry, and in particular the nexus between music and poetry, has its roots in my childhood. In third grade, my classmates and I briefly became contemporary poets when our assignment was to write our own haiku. In junior high school chorus, we performed selections from Frostiana, a selection of Robert Frost’s poems set to music by Randall Thompson, and I remember, even then, being fascinated by not only the artistry and compactness of the poetry itself, but how these same words acquired an even more compelling life when sung. The fascination continued in college when, in the glee club, we performed Paul Hindemith’s requiem, When lilacs last in the door-yard bloom’d under the leadership of a guest conductor, none other than the great Robert Shaw. It was the first poem of Whitman’s I’d ever read, and the sheer beauty and depth with which the music was able to enhance those already powerful words was overwhelming. One of my first assignments in a college composition class was a setting of Yeats’s “The Wild Swans at Coole” in which I tried to emulate, probably not very successfully, some of the lessons I learned by listening to the Hindemith. In my early 20s I read a lot more Whitman, as well as late 19th- and early 20th-century poetry, and shortly thereafter I began to explore modern and contemporary poetry. I started to keep a file of poems that interested me for one reason or another, and over the years I would choose to set some of them. My search for the poems that became the basis for this album is, I suppose, a natural outgrowth of my penchant for reading and good record-keeping!

What qualities do you admire in poems that you find especially suited to settings as art songs?

Fundamentally, I am attracted to poems that are dramatic, by which I mean they tell a story, a human story. Such poems key into my emotions, which is what prompts me to write music in the first place. Beyond the emotion of the storyline, I also respond to compelling imagery, and of course, the cadences of the sentences. Not all poems to which I’m initially attracted, however, result in satisfying musical settings. Occasionally, I’m just unable to work successfully with a poem, as much as I’d like to. One reason might be the meter becomes too unwieldy; another might be because the poem is architecturally too elliptical. I would say that, as a general matter, poems with rather straightforward structures work well. Ideally, the listener should be able to comprehend much of the setting on the first hearing, even though repeated listening will hopefully bring further understanding and revelations.

To return to your liner notes, you write: “My task as a composer was to see if I could somehow ‘add value’ to this poetry, to heighten it emotionally by taking music that is already inherent in the text and making it come alive in a different medium.” Are there any composers, past or present (of any genre), that you feel are particularly successful in accomplishing this? What elements make their work successful?

At the risk of stating the obvious, Schubert comes to mind. Die schöne Müllerin is one of my favorite song cycles, and tomes have been written about it; I will simply and humbly say I admire and try to emulate his artistry when it comes to illustrating a text musically with appropriate variations in accompaniment, tonality, and dynamics. Also, if you’ll forgive me, I’d like to take this opportunity to plug baritone Michael Kelly’s new album of that song cycle with guitar (instead of piano) accompaniment by David Leisner.

Samuel Barber’s settings of James Joyce’s poems (Three Songs, op. 10) never cease to send chills up my spine, and his Hermit Songs always enchants. Barber’s instinct for choosing good material to work with, and the empathy and wit with which he sets it, are impeccable.

One of the aspects I find especially invigorating and gratifying about contemporary American art song is the willingness of composers to embrace various musical genres, both classical and popular. That is certainly the case in your songs on this recording, which you describe as: “Always lyrical, the music veers from Romantic to jazz to chanson to bossa nova.”

I was determined to let the content and emotion of the poetry, as well as the rhythm inherent in the text, dictate the style of the music. For example, when I read the first lines of Aaron Smith’s “Liquid,” “The men of Cambridge jog / shirtless this morning,” I heard the bossa nova beats instantly—I was no doubt channeling The Girl from Ipanema, with all of is sultry and sexy associations. The same line could also be set as a waltz, with the stressed syllable on the first beat of the measure: “The men of CAMbridge jog | SWIFTly this | MORNing; but this didn’t seem the appropriate meter for the subject matter. On the other hand, the album’s title song (based on another Smith poem) was obviously a waltz: “My | MOTH-er, who didn’t | LIKE to be seen.” This, combined with the image of a French café, brought to mind the chansons of Charles Trenet (and specifically his song L’âme des poètes).

New York Pretending to Be Paris opens with Flowers, a song cycle of four poems by Cynthia Zarin. What attracted you to Zarin’s poetry?

I was captivated by the intimacy in Zarin’s work and the deftness with which she transforms quotidian objects into powerful emotional symbols. Whether describing “the terrible sky, where you walk / in our city not thinking of me” or the ascent of a staircase “inside the whorl of the house / as if I were walking up inside the lilies,” the persuasiveness of her language is palpable.

“Flowers” is also the title of the first song in a cycle “which essentially describes a courtship.” And it was the first song you set in the narrative. I’m intrigued by this comment in your notes: “I found myself wanting to know what happened with this relationship. As I read more and more of Zarin’s poems, some written before Flowers and some after, I found others that could provide a possible answer. And the cycle was born.” By the last song in Flowers, the relationship has taken a decided turn. When did you decide upon that outcome?

I suppose it was decided for me. I had chosen the first three poems and was looking for a fourth. One day, I was reading The New Yorker and came across a brand new Zarin poem, “Marina.” It was a very sad and painful poem about the end of a relationship, and it seemed to dovetail perfectly with the third poem in the cycle, “Blue Vase,” which ends on a note of ambivalence: “love enduring, give or take.” The crepe myrtle in “Marina” evokes a memory of the calla lilies in “Flowers,” so “Marina” seemed like the perfect bookend to the song cycle. I would also point out that the final lines of the first poem give a clue to where the relationship might end: “I do not know how to hold all / the beauty and sorrow of my life.” Whenever I hear this line, I think of the Japanese concept of mono no aware, the acknowledgement of the ephemerality of existence. Beauty must inevitably be accompanied by sorrow; the flower, so beautiful in full blossom, will ultimately die. The last thing I’ll say about this cycle is that the middle two poems are also linked in terms of imagery—namely the ship and the waves—and the fact that all of these connections manifested themselves amongst poems that were from disparate sources seemed to indicate they were destined to become one piece of music.

The Flowers cycle is followed by several songs, settings of poems by Thomas March, Richie Hofmann, Morri Creech, and Aaron Smith. Are these songs to be viewed collectively, or as individual works?

To tell the truth, I’ve always thought both. While each song tells a self-contained story, I think collectively they work thematically. Also, it’s not unreasonable to imagine that the songs sung by the same singer could be sung by the same “character” and tell various stories in that character’s life.

The songs explore attraction and love, with a focus on relationships between men. Elegy for a Small Town Psychic, a beautiful setting of a poem by Morri Creech, seems to stand apart from the others, at least in terms of topic. Why did you choose to include it in this collection?

While there is certainly a focus on relationships between men, for me the larger themes of the album have to do with memory and desire, and specifically how we process longing and loss. Elegy, filled with potent images and memories, is a poignant and gimlet-eyed tribute to, and acknowledgement of the profound loss of, a rather unconventional pillar of a particular community. So, in that sense, I think it fits in thematically.

Mother, a cycle of three poems (by Susan Kinsolving and Aaron Smith), concludes this recording. The first two songs (poems by Kinsolving) explore some rather unexpected and unconventional actions!

I just love Susan’s poetry. She is not afraid to tackle difficult subjects, and she laces them with her trademark dark humor. Speaking of unexpected, there is a poem called “The Case of the Carrot” in her collection Peripheral Vision that I loved and was thinking of setting, but it didn’t really fit in thematically with this particular project. I’ve had the opportunity to get to know Susan a bit because of this project. She told me a story about how when she was once asked by a reader if, like the mother in “Under House Arrest,” she had really left her newborn alone in a field. Her response was, “Poets are allowed to have imaginations.”

The final song (and the title of this disc) is a setting of Aaron Smith’s “New York Pretending to be Paris.” You immediately found this poem “especially moving, so much so that I felt compelled to run to the piano after reading it.” What qualities of this poem especially touched you?

Well, I live in New York City, and around the corner from me was a branch of a chain of French cafés called Le Pain Quotidien. (Sadly, this particular branch closed for good during the pandemic.) It had large picture windows through which you could see customers seated at tables, drinking coffee or hot chocolate out of large white bowls. Like the narrator of the poem, I have a sister and a mother who would come to visit me from out of town. It was easy to imagine my mother sitting in the window of the Le Pain Quotidien—and to imagine a time when my mother might no longer be around. The poem hit very close to home in many respects. Rather than run away from that feeling, I instantly decided to embrace and work through it musically.

You originally scored the songs on New York Pretending to be Paris for voice and piano. On this recording, they appear in your arrangements (with an assist from Nik Rodewald) for voice and “chamber-sized acoustic orchestra.” You note that you were “inspired by late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century orchestral song cycles….” I’m curious as to which cycles provided that inspiration for these lovely and colorful arrangements.

Thinking back, I suppose I had Mahler’s Songs of a Wayfarer and Shostakovich’s Six Romances on Texts by Japanese Poets in mind. I find the settings of the latter so haunting: The expressiveness of the orchestration and the exquisite word-painting beautifully convey the profound anxiety associated with unrequited love.

Tell us a bit about the participating artists on the recording.

As for the singers, the one thing they all have in common, beyond, of course, their superb artistry, is that I was originally introduced to each of them by my friend Neal Goren. Neal was the artistic director of Gotham Chamber Opera and has founded a new company called Catapult Opera. His musicianship is impeccable, and I always trust his recommendations. I was extremely impressed by how the singers were willing to explore the emotional depth of these songs and to risk exposing their own vulnerability. It truly comes through in their performances. The instrumentalists, many of whom play in local symphony orchestras and for Broadway productions, were, to a person, very generous collaborators. Chip Fabrizi, our recording engineer, Paul McKibbins, our producer, and Nik Rodewald, who created such beautiful arrangements from my detailed piano manuscript, were indispensable.

What future endeavors are on the horizon? Where can our readers learn more about you and your music?

I am working on several vocal commissions as well as two music-theater projects. I am so happy to be able to join musicians and actors in more relaxed rehearsal and performance settings once again, as the pandemic had closed down virtually all such opportunities. The best way to keep up with my various musical endeavors would be to visit the news page of my website: EricSchorr.com/news.