Poetry had been an important part of Kevin Lay’s life as long as music had. “All my life I’ve written poetry,” the Scappoose composer told ArtsWatch. One of his first moves upon arriving in Oregon was taking poetry classes with the great Oregon poet Kim Stafford. Lay had long been a fan of the poetry of Stafford’s famous late father and fellow Oregon Poet Laureate William Stafford. 

When Lay became president of Cascadia Composers, he decided to marry two of his artistic passions, and asked Stafford if he might be interested in participating in a concert of his poetry set to music by Northwest composers. Stafford agreed, but Cascadia’s board of directors had a bigger idea. Why not also include the poetry of other living Oregon Poets Laureate? Cascadia sent members a slew of poems to consider. 

The result: Saturday’s concert punningly titled Fearless Lieder (after the German word for “song”), featuring the words of Stafford, Elizabeth Woody, Paulann Petersen, and Lawson Inada, accompanied by original music from Cascadia Composers Jerry Casey, Ted Clifford, David A. Jones, Theresa Koon, Kevin Bryant Lay, Brian Magill, Lisa Neher, Judy A. Rose, Dawn Sonntag, Greg A Steinke, and Nicholas Yandell and Tristan Bliss. Recently crowned current Poet Laureate Ellen Waterston will open the show with a reading of her work, with original improvised background music. It’s a precious opportunity to experience our region’s beauty through the dual lenses of words and music.

The Cascadia concert follows another earlier this month presented by Portland Jazz Composers Ensemble. (Read my ArtsWatch story.) That one featured Oregon jazz composers’ musical responses to this year’s Oregon Book Award nominees, rather than settings of individual poems. In this second in a two part series, we again explore the several ways that Oregon composers transform Northwest writers’ words into music.

Beyond Pop

The Cascadia Composers’ brief differs a bit from the PJCE compositions, which were artistic evocations of, or responses to, whole books or chapters. These are settings of most or all of the words of individual poems, or music accompanying a voiced-over recital of the words. Yet as we’ll see, even though the source material is only a few lines instead of hundreds of pages, such is the concentrated power of poetry that those verses offer abundant inspiration for musical expression. 

Of course, every song, pop or otherwise, represents a fusion of words and music, but the process of trying to evoke stories purely in sound (as in the PJCE concert), or setting poetry to music, differs a bit from standard 20th and 21st century pop songwriting. In so-called “art song” (a term I bristle at because it implies that all those other songs, the ones most of the world actually listens to, are somehow Not Art) settings, the lyrics more definitively determine the melody. But not all the Cascadia songs are like that, as you’ll see.

To delineate the general differences, I’ve brought in an expert who really knows the score — and in fact, who’s seen the scores being performed Sunday. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Cascadia Composers secretary-treasurer, composer, and frequent ArtsWatch contributor Jeff Winslow.

“Everybody writing a song is trying to do it as well as they can, and hopes it’ll become popular at least among the audience they want to reach. No difference there. But some folks, typically called songwriters, when push comes to shove, they really want that hit. And others, typically called composers, same situation, are willing to give that up to chase their imagination into what seems the most perfect musical construction and most perfect evocation of the lyrics possible — however ‘perfect’ looks in that place of imagination. The difference is not fundamentally in the ability, or even in the vocabulary, but in the intent.

“Pop lyrics are almost always written to be set to music, whether by the same creator, or by a close associate of the lyricist as in any number of famous collaborations over time, or even as I’ve read in recent years, by teams who build hits in about the same way an engineering company builds a gizmo.  It seems it’s the lyrics that make or break the song.

“Composers almost always set poetry that was originally written with little thought of musical association and often centuries earlier. Some of the best, most powerfully evocative lieder were written to lyrics considered mediocre by poets. It seems, while the lyrics still inspire the music, it’s the music that makes or breaks the song.

“As a composer, I read a poem that happens to resonate emotionally in me, who knows why. I’m moved to capture that resonance in music, following its every twist and turn, shade and highlight, from beginning to end.”

Thanks, Jeff! Now, the process of transmuting words into music can differ from composer to composer and even with the same composer on different projects. This little series aims to show a few of many possible approaches. 

Hearing the Music in the Words

Weaving baskets you twine the strands into four parts.
Then, another four. The four directions many times.
Pairs of fibers spiral around smaller and smaller sets of threads.
Then, one each time. Spirals hold all this design
airtight and pure. This is our house, over and over.
Our little sisters, Khoush, Sowitk, Piaxi, Wakamu,
the roots will rest inside.
We will be together in this basket.
We will be together in this life.

“Weaving,” by Elizabeth Woody

For Kevin Lay, the process of setting poetry to music is fairly intuitive, and almost always starts with a single line. He’s a guitarist, and so is familiar with pop songwriting techniques.

“In pop when you’ve got a set of chords already, and you let yourself get into it, you might arrive” at lyrics that fit that chord progression, he explains. “But when you’re writing art song, the music is already in the lyrics and you’re just putting it in notes.”

And just where does he find that music?

“It’s about the poetry,” Lay explains. “It’s a natural place to start. The words have a natural spoken rhythm. It’s got enough constraints to make [composing the music] easier” than facing an entirely blank slate. 

Still, the process isn’t entirely rational. “It’s not just a mechanical thing,” he cautions. “You have to live with a poem for awhile to get something that’s more musical.” He’ll record the words and listen to them over and over again. “Eventually, certain lines and words jump out. It’s not like you think about it too much. It’s more about trust, just paying attention, trying to stay open and feel it. If you’re quiet inside, there’s a feeling in the body and it maps onto sound somehow.”

That’s when the initial melody appears, coming to him whole and unbidden. “Sometimes one particular line you really love has so much music in it that you have to write it down,” he says. “I hear it in my head. Then you say, ‘that’s a fourth,’” or whatever intervals, chords and other elements have echoed in his imagination. 

While the process starts intuitively, Lay has developed his craft over many years to the point where he can immediately translate what he’s hearing in his head to a written score, using a digital interface that connects his guitar to his composing software.

“Then things fall into place,” he continues. “That first piece of the puzzle suggests other pieces. It’s a convergence thing.” Then he writes down and records what emerges. And repeats. “I just keep listening to what’s happening. You can always change it. You got something started.“ When he has the beginning melody solidified, Lay will then flesh out the surrounding harmonies.

 Lay never tries to literally translate a poem’s action into music, like a film score. Instead, “I try to express what I’m feeling when I’m living with the poem,” he says. “What’s the difference between sorrow and a really sad song? The emotion, the body, the feeling on one side, then the mind on the other side.”

The literal location of those epiphanies? Lay often discovers them while in “that little meditative trance state I like to get into,” which can happen at his desk or a coffee shop. 

For Elizabeth Woody’s poem “Weaving,” that initial triggering line was “Our little sisters, Khoush, Sowitk, Piaxi, Wakamu,” which are the original names of four edible roots, whom the poet invites to share the home — that is, the basket — the weaver is making. That stirred an emotion in Lay.

“It sounds like she’s calling her little sisters for lunch,” he says. “I mean it to have this joyful tenderness kind of feeling. For the Warm Springs people, baskets are houses for the roots they gather for food. She’s building a little home for the sisters and they’re all going to live in it. We are what we eat!”

The rest of the poem also moved Lay, who plunged into research about the subject, and traveled to the Warm Springs Museum to discuss the music with Woody and learn how to pronounce the Native names in the poem.

“There’s a lot of mystery in weaving a basket,” he says. “They live with these baskets. They make these baskets their friends. They find the roots in the wild, dig them up, and tend them.” 

The poem’s recurring image of spirals also sparked ideas. “When you look at [woven] baskets, you see spirals and spirals,” Lay explains. “There’s a sense of the whole galaxy in these spirals.” In fact, he sprinkled an image of a rotating galaxy throughout the notated score. But unlike composers such as, say, George Crumb, Lay didn’t actually a drawing to determine the notes. (“It was hard to notate.”) Instead, he explained the “spiral glissandi” sound he wanted to the Portland harpist who’d perform it, Kate Petak, whom he’d worked with before, and together, they figured out her part. The spirals reminded him of the patterns traced by the hands of a harpist when plucking and strumming her instrument. 

Along with a soprano to sing the words, Lay also wanted the sweetness of a violin to evoke the tenderness expressed in the poem. “The harpist’s hands move in spirals to weave a sonic basket,” he wrote in a program note, “and the violin is like a needle and thread.”

Finding the Groove

We begin with flowers beaded onto the cradleboard.
The mattress and forms hold the child’s head center and upright:
The legs and spine will be straight.
The laces spiral over the center: They will shape the child.
The baby emerges from the womb and is safely enclosed again.
Leaning on a tree or hanging from a saddle,
the child is connected to us and watches as we gather
huckleberries, catch and clean salmon, dry the roots.
This beginning with protection is brilliant
with attention to detail: cradleboards have a song.
Shells tinkle on the rounded rose bough
that guards the child’s face as we walk.
Contoured flowers edging the carriage in arms,
made by relatives especially for the child
to ensure the soul will bloom.

“We Remember Our Relatives,” by Elizabeth Woody. 

Elizabeth Woody’s words will also be accompanied by another piece on the Cascadia program. Composer/conductor/singer/flutist Judy A. Rose will improvise music on a Native American flute under a reading of Woody’s “We Remember Our Relatives.” 

Rose was drawn to the song because “I’m adopted,” she says. “When you’re adopted sometimes you wonder who your relatives are. I was thinking of how she describes Native children on their cradle boards, the steps the mother takes to take care of the child, that community that comes together to help shape that child. I love how she says that.”

Because it’s to be improvised in performance, we can’t talk about Rose’s creative process, except to say that when she listens to a recording of the poet reading the poem, she’ll choose the appropriate flute, “depending on the sound of her voice,” she says.

We can certainly explore Rose’s other contribution to the Cascadia concert. She was attracted to the word that serves as both title and subject of Kim Stafford’s poem, “Resilience.” (You can hear Stafford read “Resilience,” talk about the collaboration with Rose, and enjoy their performance of her composition, on All Classical Portland’s Thursdays @ Three radio program, streamable here through early December.) Stafford’s notion that resilience means more than simple toughness — juggling it with tenderness — resonated with her own experience. She decided to set the piece to music performed by a vocal ensemble.

“Growing up as a young black woman and even later in life, you need to be resilient,” Rose muses. “I wonder what this word really means. If you take out the ‘I’ after the ‘l,’ it’s ‘silence.’ What does that mean to the Black community? What did it mean to me? Wouldn’t that be interesting — to take a word that’s been used to tell me what I should be, stoic. But what does it really mean to me, instead of something that’s put upon me, telling you what you have to be.“ 

Now, how to turn the poem into music? Like many composers, Rose approaches songwriting in various ways. She has extensive experience with words. Not only does she write her own songs (this is only the second time she’s set another writer’s text), she’s married to an award winning poet, and even took a class from Stafford years ago. The two stayed in touch. 

“I don’t use a piano to compose,” she says. “I write everything in my head, but every piece you write, it’s something different. Sometimes the words come first, sometimes the music comes, sometimes a specific rhythm comes. Or you draw on an idea you had 10 years ago sitting in your hard drive.” 

Rose rejected a few tentative initial configurations, such as a typical art song or spiritual. Her instincts told her that the opening sentiment about resilience being strong as iron demanded a punchier setting than typically achievable in a long-winding, art song-style approach. 

She also considered but decided not to write a pop ballad with piano (“like something Natalie Cole would have sung), nor (after playing around on her guitar) a straight folksy, singer-songwriter style song. “The emotion of it — it has to be choral,” Rose (a choral singer and director herself) remembers thinking, recalling the feeling she got when she directed the Pacific University concert choir last year in a choral arrangement of the great Seattle band Fleet Foxes’ hit “White Winter Hymnal.”

For added iron-like pulsating power, “I wanted to do something with body percussion, just a basic stomp and snap thing,” inspired by the African American dance/music tradition of stepping. That was the first bit she wrote.

“It felt like it had to be kind of forceful,” Rose explains. “But not in your face because [the text] asks questions: is it this, is it that? So I decided to put a groove on it — a driving piece with a groove,” she says. 

She chose the key of c minor (“I think in warm keys”), and experimented with five different iterations of the opening line melody before settling on the final choice, dictated by the structure of Stafford’s lines. “I didn’t want to change how he wrote,” she explains, though in a few places, small alterations, repetitions and so on were necessary to make it work musically.

She assigned the singers an a cappella (unaccompanied) groove, followed by strong opening chords grounded in bass and tenor vocals, perhaps evoking Stafford’s line about “how trees, deep rooted, bend.” And urged them to sing in a style that lies “between a choral piece but in some places poppy kind of chesty.”

She also decided to make the collaboration even stronger by bringing in Stafford himself to intone a few lines in the middle section of her song, with the choir harmonizing wordless vocals underneath his reading to keep the beat going.

“Resilience” just might be the perfect poem for the aftermath of this month’s national election. Here’s a few lines.

Resilience is the one who whispers at darkest hours: this too shall pass
Resilience begins in knowing sorrow and ends in finding how to tell its tale.
Resilience says in tough trouble, “I wonder what we’ll learn?”
Resilience means you need not win, and yet prevail.

“Resilience,” by Kim Stafford.

And Rose’s musical version might be its ideal and necessary expression of it. The author thinks so.

“I’ll never think of it on the page again,” Stafford told All Classical host Christa Wessel. “It belongs on the air, a diversity of voices singing the poem together. It’s like my poem was the bud and as the singers come forth, it bursts into flower.” 

Electronic & Dramatic

Where the earth has swallowed a star,
a first corn plant grows. Each stalk
rustles with the riff of wind.
Each ear tassels, streaming its silk—
those milky wisps-into blue air.
Within, kernels bubble into constellations.
Long rows of cheek-to-cheek suns.
Where earth has swallowed
a moon, a melon plant emerges.
Tendrilled insistence. Blooms
big and yellow as an afternoon’s yawn.
The fruit pale, glowing, growing
phase by phase. Mottled skin.
Sweet flesh of borrowed light.
In the spot where earth opened
to swallow a comet, a silver birch
erupts. White fire’s tall column
marked with scars of blackest night,
topped by a glimmer of pale leaves.
Each season thereafter,
earth starts over. More
rooted rows of stars. New vines
strung with lunar pearls.
More trunks afire, risen.
Bursting. Green.

Sponsor

“Sown,” by Paulann Petersen.

Like Rose and Lay, Nicholas Yandell inhabits a world of words as well as music. His partner is a poet and writer, he works at Powell’s Books, and “I spend almost equal time writing fiction and poetry as music,” he says. “And I’ve loved mixing the two, creating different written forms and putting music behind that,” as in a 2019 piece with 45^th Parallel with the poetry of Micah Fletcher.

This time, he’d use words by Paulann Petersen, whom he knew from reading her books and working with her in events at Powell’s. Maybe because of his familiarity with dramatic narrative, “I looked for a particular poem that had a level of drama to it,” Yandell remembers. “I can immediately connect a story really easily to music.”

He found it in “Sown,” specifically in its third stanza, “where there’s a distinct mood change” from the preceding two, he says, “and then the final stanza brings it back to the surprising original idea. The instant I saw the poem, I connected with it. I thought, I totally get this.”

He’d initially envisioned Petersen reciting the poem aloud, over music pulsating beneath her vocal line. “I wanted the words to be happening at same time as the music — but enhancing the words,” he remembers, rather than accompanying them in standard song forms. “The fact that I knew the words were going to be placed over the music, and not so much set like an art song, really appealed to me.”

Petersen’s appearance didn’t work out, so Yandell will read the words aloud, but he kept the idea of a supportive, independent musical backdrop happening simultaneously with the reading. This contemporary style of mixing words and music “has been a favorite combination and type of performance” recently, Yandell says. “It has that energy of the live reading, some spontaneity. It can vary a lot.”

He also knew that he wanted an acoustic harp to carry the central musical weight. “It has a certain harmonic quality that’s more impressionistic,” befitting the text’s spacy imagery. Like Lay, he’d worked with Kate Petak before and written a piece for her when he was named 2020 Oregon Music Teachers Association Composer Of the Year. They’d built a working relationship that allowed her to trust him when the score called for some unconventional moves, and to help him figure out how to make the sound he imagined work in performance. 

“Harmonically and melodically, I wanted it to be natural for the harp,” Yandell says, which meant using glissandi and arpeggios (if you’ve heard harp music, you’ll recognize those characteristic sounds), and, crucially, basing the piece’s harmony on what works best for that instrument. From there, he let the actual rhythm of Petersen’s words dictate many creative choices. 

“When I’m setting a text, I want to let the text be my guide,” he explains. “Not all composers approach it that way. For some, the music and text are more equal. But when I have a text, this is my map, and everything else supports the text.” Paradoxically, “It is liberating to me to do that,” he says. Composers have known that for a long time. “The more constraints one imposes,” the great 20^th century composer Igor Stravinsky wrote, “the more one frees oneself.”

The poem suggested a “steady passing of time,” which meant “a fairly regular rhythmic part with the harp,” and only a couple of tempo changes. Even so, words can be read aloud in a variety of ways, which gives the composer a lot of freedom. To get the sound and general rhythm and pace of how he wanted to hear the poem performed, Yandell read the words aloud at the tempo he wanted to hear it, noting phrases that left room for some natural punctuation and pauses, some breathing space for the music to surge. 

Then he used that information to align the words on a score sheet, with appropriate phrasing. The four stanzas divided the music naturally into four sections. He wrote some initial harp music based on the poem’s rhythms and his phrasing, then re-recorded the words in response to that music. 

“That way I could give myself the flexibility that allowed the reading itself to be more free over the music,” to make a live performance sound natural, he says. “I didn’t want the words to feel cemented in place.” 

With these parameters established, Yandell continued composing, balancing the needs of the reader (and audience) with those of the musical line. “You learn along the way the specifics of how to place the text,” he says. “The music and the words go back and forth — they inform each other. Once I had a happy medium, I read them live” over a digital version of the musical score, then made further adjustments as needed for clarity, beauty and so on. 

“I didn’t exactly know what I wanted at the beginning,” Yandell explains. “It’s very much more like a trial and error thing. Does that sound right? No? Ok, then let’s try this. It’s less preplanning and more, let’s try a lot of things. Once I heard [the music] resonate with the poem, I knew: that’s it.”

But he wasn’t finished. The poem’s Space Age subject matter suggested that solely using an instrument mostly associated with the 19^th century “would have had a nostalgic feel to it,” Yandell explains. “But the poem is viewing this natural phenomenon through a contemporary lens.” So he knew all along that he’d need to add more modern sounds, “a touch of sci-fi to it.” And he had the ideal source.

Yandell plays in an electronica/cyberpunkish duo called Gentle Heresy with Salem composer Tristan Bliss. “So I’m used to working with electronic sounds,” he says. “I feel more instinctual with really understanding the sounds and how I want to manipulate them. I love mixing two things that normally wouldn’t be mixed together: electronics and the classical acoustics of the harp.”

Because Bliss “has that electronic expertise in generative sounds,” Yandell asked his creative partner to create live concert sound effects for the harp, to “build a live sound backing track and electronics” for the composition. (They’re listed as co-composers on this piece.)

As with Petak, the fact that Yandell had a comfortable working relationship and communication with Bliss made it easier to call him up and collaborate. “It’s definitely a real plus if you have that familiarity between performers and collaborators,” he says.

As complex as the unconventional combo sounds, the piece actually came together fairly quickly. “This was very natural and intuitive piece for me to compose,” Yandell says. “It’s a lot of how I’ve been composing more and more lately. I want to feel more the intuitive side. I usually like to set up a basic structure and use the intellectual aspects of creation to compose a piece, but in this one, in a way I feel like I let my heart take in the words and produce the music.” Put that way, it doesn’t sound so far from what Rose and Lay said.

Nor, really, from the composers in Part 1 of this little series about drawing music from words. At some point, all their experience (both musical training, reading, study and just living in humanity) and expertise joins the source material in a rich pond of undifferentiated intuition, from which ideas and sounds flow, in a process that in some respects isn’t quite capable of being spelled out. And thank the muses for that — otherwise, artificial intelligence could (and, alas, already does) produce the sounds. But it’s hard to imagine that music feeling as moving, as right for the words, as the sounds created by conscientious, living composers who devote so much attention and feeling to the words that inspire them. 

And even in a few lines of poetry, there’s so much to draw from: the sound and rhythm of the words themselves, the themes underlying the words, the subjects, the stories the narrative poems tell, the characters, the imagery, and above all, the emotions the poems stir in readers, including composers. As composer Jeff Winslow noted above, with such fertile sources of inspiration available, it’s no wonder composers will keep turning to those abundant wellsprings for artistic refreshment. 

Cascadia Composers presents Fearless Lieder at 7:30 PM Saturday, November 23, The Old Madeleine Church, 3123 Northeast 24th Avenue Portland. Tickets here.