Edith Borroff

Tenor, piano

Note from the composer:

In 1989 I was asked to compose a group of songs on poems by Walt Whitman. In 1990 the cycle was completed.

The challenge of composing a setting for texts written so long ago is a great one: violently modern settings seem completely at odds with the thought and the style, while going back to an earlier musical diction seems to leave the poems in the nineteenth century rather than bringing them forward into the twentieth.

The answer for this set of songs was to turn to simple configurations and use them in a new way, having then a part of both worlds. I decided upon a classic declamation for the voice, operatic in "Tears!" and more straightforward in the other songs; the piano counter-part of each song would be based in its own trichord (or, in one case, tetrachord) relationship. In schematic form, the five songs are based on the five schemata: C-G-A [and a chordal C-G-D); D-Eb-A-Bb, C-F-Bb and C-E-F; Eb-G-A; and an alternation of C-E-F_ and C-E-B. The limitation proved as limitation always does, to be highly energizing, while giving the songs a variety of sound within the unity of aesthetic commitment.