On Wings of Song

Brunetti, Drysdale, Millay, Lyte, Field (E)

What lifts us up, energizes us, inspires us - what gives us wings - is the theme of this 35-minute sequence of five songs for soprano and piano, which are played without pause.

The first poem, David Brunetti’s "I Can Change," celebrates the tantalizing possibility of personal change, as glimpsed in and inspired by the surrounding world. Brunetti’s vivid, far-flung images are held together by a rigid structure. Four of the five verses begin with the word "if" (e.g., "if that worm … can turn into something exquisite …"), then conclude with the affirmation, "I can change." The music beneath these verses is fast and breathless, offering the composer the challenge of differentiating the two portions of each verse while maintaining forward motion.

"New Year’s Eve" was written by Carla Drysdale as an appreciation for my piano performance, in drag, at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, New Year’s Eve 1998. At breakfast on New Year’s Day, Carla presented me with her newly-minted poem and I delightedly set it to music. What lifted her, moved her, was not so much my piano-playing or the celebratory night, but rather the audacious dress (and accessories) in which I flew, as it were, across the keyboard. The song is fast and fiery, with an overdeveloped piano part reminiscent of my New Year’s Eve exertions.

The third and fourth songs are a contrasting pair, as their respective subtitles underscore: The third song, "What Lips My Lips Have Kissed," by Edna St. Vincent Millay, is subtitled "Song of Loss and Pain," and counterposed to it is a "Song of Faith and Hope" - my subtitle for "Abide With Me," which is the fourth song. "What Lips" is the still-point of the cycle - a wingless place where regret and hopelessness banish the possibility of uplifting flight of any kind. The music, in E-flat minor, is static, sluggish and chromatic. Only near the end does an ecstatic passage in the piano touch upon the major mode and suggest a momentary lifting of the gloom. By way of fulfillment, "Abide With Me," an E-flat major setting of Henry Lyte’s familiar hymn-text, flies us to a brighter world, full of infinite possibility. During the final verse, the famous hymn-tune associated with the Lyte text is added as counterpoint to the piano part, around which the soprano weaves a graceful melisma in alt.

The climactic final song, "A Visitation," by Edward Field, is the longest and most epic. Wings, no longer mere metaphorical allusion, are actually made flesh (or perhaps feather) in this narrative poem - the tale of an angel who crashes to earth and startles, then deeply touches, the two earthling witnesses. The music begins dramatically, even violently ("The man fell out of the sky"). Then, as the angel awakens and begins to speak, the music turns unearthly and mysterious, as if from another planet. Each narrative event of the poem is pictured vividly in the music - the angel speaks the word "brother" - his limbs miraculously heal - a ship descends to take him away, while the earthlings fall into a trance. Towards the end there is an extended, neo-romantically rich, epilogue: "Then we awoke, looking at each other with wonder." At the very end, a new melody suddenly appears and makes manifest, in its Mendelssohnian way, the full significance of the title On Wings of Song.