Have you ever found a poem that cried out to be sung? Have you subsequently wondered where you might find a composer who’d agree to set it?
For several years, I wrestled with this same challenge: How could I commission an art song that could be packaged as a bonus CD with my then-novel-in-progress, The Voice I Just Heard. My book tells the story of a gifted soprano who renounces performing after the death of her brother. But when my protagonist vows to restore the Cohoes Falls, a real waterfall that has been diverted for hydropower, she commissions and eventually sings an art song, a setting of Thomas Moore’s 1804 poem, “Lines Written at the Cohos (sic), or Falls of the Mohawk River.”
Having grown up in Cohoes, New York, I had no problem writing about the decline of my hometown waterfall, which various power companies have reduced to a trickle. When it came time to draft my description of the song, however, I realized I lacked the musical savvy to describe a non-existent vocal melody and accompaniment. Since the song helps my heroine resume singing, I also worried that my future readers would feel cheated if they couldn’t “hear” the music.
I’m a fan of Lieder and American song, and two masters I love, Schumann and Ives, both set texts by Thomas Moore, the national poet of Ireland in the early 1800s and the librettist for the popular songbook, Irish Melodies. But I was unfamiliar with the work of contemporary songwriters, and I wasn’t sure whether an unknown author—or anyone for that matter—could call a composer out of the blue. Was there an unwritten protocol for song commissions?
I didn’t know anyone I could ask, and for a long while I let uncertainty deter my ambitions. Yet the prospect of a song kept haunting me, so I began researching composers, collecting discs, and attending recitals that included new vocal music. I was seeking an artist who could filter Moore’s allegorical imagery through a modern musical prism without cutting the poet’s lush 34-line text.
This seemed a tall order, and a novelist friend warned me I was heading off on a tangent that might dilute my writing energies. “Can’t you just make it up?” she asked. Over the next several months I tried, but my yearning for the real thing kept me awake at night. I gradually understood that the absence of the song, not the distraction of my quest, was preventing me from completing my book.
I drafted a proposal, thinking I would instinctively know when I had found the right composer. This wasn’t as strange as it sounds. Countless times during the writing process, I had received the exact information I needed at crucial moments. It happened again in September of 2002 while I was thumbing through the Washington Post. My intuition went into overdrive when I read that baritone Randall Scarlata would premiere Lori Laitman’s new song cycle at his D.C. Vocal Arts Society recital.
I ran to my computer, searched the Web for Laitman, and instantly found her site. I learned that her songs are performed widely in the United States and abroad, and why not? After ordering her debut album, Mystery, I decided she gave each poet a voice that was distinctive and harmonically surprising. Her music was truly lyrical. She was my ideal composer!
Lori Laitman and I live in the same county, and maybe that’s why I found the nerve to e-mail my proposal to her. To my amazement, she wrote back the next day, inviting me to send Moore’s text. She warned me that although she was intrigued by the song-novel idea, her schedule was jammed—she was editing her second album, Dreaming, and composing a cycle for soprano Jennifer Check. I wondered if Laitman would pencil in my song for, say, 2008.
The poem’s beauty, however, proved irresistible to the composer who, like my heroine and I, loved Moore’s paean to a once-majestic waterfall. Just three days after I sent her the text, Laitman invited me to her home and performed the “bare bones” of the song that had kept her awake the night before—but there was nothing bare about her luminous vocal line. It brought tears to my eyes, and I felt a shock of recognition, as though the music had been waiting for me all along. I wanted to weave this song into my narrative:
From rise of morn till set of sun
I’ve seen the mighty Mohawk run …
Laitman’s word painting evoked the sound of the falls in the song’s earliest incarnation. She later told me she had adapted the words in free-flowing meters that mimicked the flow of water, and she’d used a descending harmonic pattern throughout the song to suggest water rushing downward.
Thomas Moore’s poem compares the journey of life to a river that moves inexorably toward its “destined falls,” and Laitman’s song captured both the melancholy of life’s travails and the triumphant bloom of hope in the closing quatrain:
Oh, may my falls be bright as thine!
May heaven’s forgiving rainbow shine
Upon the mist that circles me
As soft, as now it hangs o’er thee!
The music evolved over several months as the composer made refinements. The next challenge was to find a singer who could “take it off the page,” as Laitman would say. In the novel I describe my protagonist’s voice as a shaft of pure silver light, and we heard this quality in Sari Gruber’s tone when she sang on the composer’s Dreaming album. So you might say it was a “dream come true” when Laitman asked Gruber to record “Lines Written at the Falls” on June 7, 2005, a performance that displays the soprano’s ravishing coloratura and interpretive gifts. Somehow, neither Laitman nor I were surprised when, just a few weeks later, Sari Gruber won first prize in the 2005 Walter W. Naumburg Foundation International Vocal Competition. [Editor’s Note: CS profiled Gruber in our May 2006 issue.]
After completing several rewrites I am now marketing my novel, and with luck the book/CD will find a home on some publisher’s list. Laitman’s song should also enjoy a rich, independent life as it enters the standard soprano repertoire. Frankly, I can’t think of a more fitting tribute to a waterfall whose charms will never again be “unsung.” (In the years since I drafted my book, many civic and conservation groups, in tandem with city and state leaders, have raised their voices, clamoring for the restoration of the Cohoes Falls. Life imitating art? You tell me!)
Since I met Lori Laitman four years ago, she has written many new song cycles and earned acclaim as “one of the finest art song composers on the scene today, who deservedly stands shoulder to shoulder with Ned Rorem for her uncommon sensitivity to text, her loving attention to the human voice, and her extraordinary palette of musical colors and gestures” (The Journal of Singing). Laitman’s third CD, Becoming A Redwood, was just released on the Albany label, and features Sari Gruber and Jennifer Check, among other artists.
My relationship with Lori Laitman has been so rewarding. I urge you to take a leaf from my book (pun intended!) and contact composers with your ideas. As Laitman recently told me, “I have been incredibly fortunate to work with so many fine singers. Soprano Lauren Wagner, the first to commission me, was invaluable in advising me how to write effectively for the voice. I have since written for many singers, and I am always willing to adapt my vocal lines to suit particular voices. It is my belief that a happy singer will do a better job communicating a song’s promise than an unhappy singer.”
Most composers are easy to find on the Web. With a bit of sleuthing, you might find a lifelong collaborator who will tailor his or her music to your unique vocal gifts.
Singers: start your search engines!
For information about Lori Laitman, visit www.artsongs.com. For information about Sari Gruber, visit www.SariGruber.com.
