Faculty Concert: Carrie Shaw: The Weight of Sweetness: Songs for All the Senses

Selected from 689 applicants from 44 countries, composer Chris Trapani was awarded the Barlow commission for a new song cycle to be premiered by an elite quartet of sopranos, including UW’s own Carrie Shaw. Hear the premiere of this major contribution to American art song, alongside works by living composers from around the world in her program "The Weight of Sweetness: Songs for All the Senses." Shaw is joined onstage by faculty colleagues Cristina Valdés, piano; and Andrew Romanick, piano and vocoder.

Program

Songs of Enchantment (1989) Juliana Hall (b. 1958)
10 Songs for Soprano or Mezzo-Soprano and Piano
Texts by Walter de la Mare (1873-1956)

1 – Daybreak
2 – Away Go We
3 – Double Dutch
4 – The Spotted Flycatcher
5 – The Ride-By-Nights
6 – Company
7 – Alas, Alack!
8 – Hide and Seek
9 – Silly Sallie
10 – The Song of Enchantment

Andrew Romanick, piano

Lady Reason Suite (2021): Kate Soper (b. 1981)
For soprano, piano, and vocoder

I. First Recitative
II. Lady Reason's Symmetrical Virelai
III. Second Recitative
IV. Lady Reason's Torch Song/Third Recitative
V. Lady Reason's Collapsing Sestina

Andrew Romanick, MIDI-controlled vocoder
Cristina Valdes, piano

-Brief Intermission-

the color of where you can never go (2022):  Christopher Trapani (b. 1980)

I. Blue
II. Light
III. Color
IV. Longing
V. Far
VI. Distance
VII. Lost

Cristina Valdes, piano

Program Notes

Songs of Enchantment (1989), Juliana Hall

SONGS OF ENCHANTMENT is a collection of 10 short songs on children’s poetry by the great English poet, Walter de la Mare. These poems are, by turns, fanciful, charming, humorous, endearing, ghostly, and mysterious, all seen through a child’s gentle innocence and a child’s awareness of detail and changing emotion and color. Suitable for soprano or mezzo-soprano, singers will enjoy the purity of expression and the directness of sentiment offered by de la Mare’s richly drawn poetic characters.

1. DAYBREAK 

The curtains of the solemn night 
Draw back ; and daybreak fair 
Shines on these tulips cold with dew. 

II. AWAY GO WE 

One, two, three. 
And away go we! 
Shingle, starfish. 
Sand, and sea! 
Wind on cheek. 
Clear sun on skin ; 
The tumbling waves 
Sweep out, sweep in. 

A magic, broken 
Music calls 
In the water 
As it falls ; 
Voices, a sigh,
A long-drawn hush. 
As back - in myriad 
Bubbles - gush 
The green-grey ripples. 
Flecked with snow -
A music solemn 
Sweet, and low.

III. Double Dutch

That crafty cat, a buff-black Siamese,
Sniffing through wild wood, sagely, silently goes,
Prick ears, lank legs, alertly twitching nose,
And on her secret errand reads with ease
A language no man knows.

IV. The Spotted Flycatcher

Gray on gray post, this silent little bird
Swoops on its prey—prey neither seen nor heard!
A click of bill; a flicker; and, back again!
Sighs Nature an Alas? Or merely, Amen

V. The Ride-By-Nights

Up on their brooms the Witches stream. 
Crooked and black in the crescent’s gleam ; 
One foot high, and one foot low. 
Bearded, cloaked, and cowled, they go. 

’Neath Charlie’s W^ane they twitter and tweet. 
And away they swarm ’neath the Dragon’s feet. 
With a whoop and a flutter they swing and sway. 
And surge pell-mell down the Milky Way. 

Between the legs of the glittering Chair 
They hover and squeak in the empty air. 

Then round they swoop past the glimmering Lion 
To where Sirius barks behind huge Orion; 

Up, then, and over to wheel amain 
Under the silver, and home again.

VI. Company

There must be ghosts, I think, in this old house.
Often, when I am alone,
The quiet intensifies;
The very air seems charged with mute surmise;
I pause to listen, with averted eyes;
As if in welcome. And a passionate rapture,
As if at some thing long since pondered on,
Wells suddenly up within me. . . . Then is gone.

VII. Alas, Alack!

Ann, Ann! 
   Come! quick as you can!
There's a fish that talks
   In the frying pan!
Out of the fat,
  As clear as glass,
He put up his mouth
  And moaned "Alas!"
Oh, most mournful,
  "Alas, alack!"
Then turned to his sizzling
  And sank him back.

VIII. Hide and Seek

Hide and seek, says the Wind, 
In the shade of the woods; 
Hide and seek, says the Moon, 
To the hazel buds; 
Hide and seek, says the Cloud, 
Star on to star; 
Hide and seek, says the Wave 
At the harbour bar; 
Hide and seek, say I, 
To myself, and step 
Out of the dream of Wake 
Into the dream of Sleep.

IX. Silly Sallie

Silly Sallie! Silly Sallie! 
Called the boys down Blind Man’s Alley; 
But she, still smiling, never made 
A sign she had heard, or answer gave; 
Her blue eyes in her skimpy hair 
Seemed not to notice they were there; 
Seemed still to be watching, rain or shine. 
Some other place, not out, but in: 
Though it pleased the boys in Blind Man’s Alley 
Still to be shouting Silly Sallie! 

X. Songs of Enchantment

A Song of Enchantment I sang me there. 
In a green — green wood, by waters fair. 
Just as the words came up to me 
I sang it under the wild-wood tree. 

Widdershins turned I, singing it low, 
Watching the wild birds come and go; 
No cloud in the deep dark blue to be seen 
Under the thick-thatched branches green. 

Twilight came; silence came; 
The planet of evening’s silver flame ; 
By darkening paths I wandered through 
Thickets trembling widi drops of dew. 

But the music is lost and the words are gone 
Of the song I sang as I sat alone. 
Ages and ages have fallen on me — 
On the wood and the pool and the elder tree.

Lady Reason Suite (2021), Kate Soper

This suite of arias and recits for keyboard and vocoder are drawn from Soper’s opera Romance of the Rose, which premiered just a couple of months ago at Long Beach Opera. Lady Reason, initially preaching against emotion and romance, falls in love over the course of the opera with the opera’s protagonist.

I. First Recitative

(To audience) Good evening. I am Lady Reason. And you are a fool, to succumb to the pangs of
love – that weakness which preys on degraded minds! Fear not: I have come to instruct you on
how to renounce this rose for good.
Do the wounds in your breast not smart? Well, then, do you not wish to be cured of your
afflication?
You don’t know? How is it possible that you should hesitate to choose between anguished tumult
and good sense?
You heard some music? Some beautiful, sad music?
(To pianist) Stop that! There is no such thing as “sad music.” Music cannot be sad, or happy, or
frightened, or confused, it cannot indicate some state that it feels, it is not sentient!
Music and love: twin sicknesses which hijack the emotions and override the mind! And yet, there
do exist virtuous alternatives to the depravity which oppresses you.

II. Lady Reason’s Symmetrical Viral

Love that’s born of a sound mind
Sings with a voice just;
This vulgar
Love
Will dull your
Senses with moist lust
And with mere noise unrefined.
(Spoken) First alternative: platonic love.
Love that comes to thee
Via amity
Can bestow
Joy as free of sin
As a cadence in
Mi-re-do.
For in firm friendship is twined
Rectitude with trust,
And this pure
Love
May rid your
Soul of its disgusting
urges better declined.
(Spoken) Second alternative: maternal love.
Love can manifest
As a God-professed
Debt you owe,
That’s by rote conferred
As each note in your
Twelve-tone row.
For womankind by design
To her begats must
Deliver
Love
To give her
Species a chance: thus
Saith injunction divine.
(Spoken) Third alternative: universal love.
Love like this permits
All to warm in its
Holy glow;
Running like a chromatic
scale o’er
All we know.
When to the whole of mankind
You nobly entrust
All of your
Love,
The thrall you’re
Under will then rust
And your heart’s chains will unbind.
Love that’s born of a sound mind
Sings with a voice just;
This vulgar
Love
Will dull your
Senses with moist lust
And with mere noise unrefined.

III. Second Recitative

Cleave to the pursuit of this rose, and you will find yourself degraded and bereft! But this garden
need not be a hateful prison of vice: follow me, and you will find it a paradise of order and
cultivation! 

IV. Lady Reason’s Torch Song/Third Recitative

Darling, the first time I saw you
My prefrontal cortex flooded with dopamine
I felt an increase in stress hormone production
For the most chemically compatible specimen I’ve seen.
Oh, baby, when you touch me,
Acetylcholine fills my nuclei,
Neural arousal in your preoptic area draws you near,
We just can’t deny…
Oxytocin proliferates in my hypothalamus,
I’m helplessly star-struck
Vasopressin is released from our pituitary glands
As we start to fuck!
Don’t look so shocked. After all, there is no real incompatibility between the pleasures of love and
reason. When a sexual act is motivated by rationality – and there do exist rational reasons to
copulate – then that act may… (euphemistically) ‘run its course’…even if this entails a momentary
cessation of higher intellectual functions when the pleasure becomes… overpowering. After all,
falling asleep incurs loss of rational control, and yet you’re asleep and dreaming at this very
moment. If sleep is a harmless and even virtuous temporary interruption in the supremacy of
reason, why not the well-ordered sex act?
The love you are infected with is the love that is found in hearts that are corrupt and diseased: the
love that comes from Lady Fortune.

V. Lady Reason’s Collapsing Sestina

Flinging light like coins for paupers, the moon
Flaunts stolen radiance in her gleaming face,
Then sinks into the extinguishing night
To rise again bright as when she last rose.
So Lady Fortune now deals shining love,
Now dull misery, as her wheel doth turn.
And you, shrinking and charging in turn,
Creep thief-like, by the light of the moon,
Towards a flickering vision of love
Proffered by Fortune’s beckoning face;
Yet each time you draw near to your rose,
You are flung bereft into the night.
What is this foolish quest, O Knight?
What vow compels you to return?
Could there be, besides this veiled rose
For which you continually moon,
A truer and uncovered face,
That reflects, mirror-like, your love?
Fortune tempts you with love
She swears will change the night
To day, but mark her face:
One cheek of luster will turn
To one blotched as the moon,
As thorns blemish a rose.
Yet in you arose
The fetters of love
So that like the moon
Locked in circling night
You ever must turn
Towards a turning face.
Face
It, your rose
Will turn
Your love
Into a night
Without a moon.
And now you must face the truth of your love,
And know that your rose, like that sphere which at night
Eternally turns, shall ever be fatally, woefully, wholly ungraspably, always unreachably ever remote
as the moon.

the color of where you can never go (2022), Christopher Trapani *world premiere

Composer's Note:

the color of where you can never go is a song cycle built on a prose text, entirely excerpted from the second chapter of Rebecca Solnit's A Field Guide to Getting Lost. A single argument from this astonishing work of meandering, poetic non-fiction is distilled into seven songs, each given a one-word title from the text. Just as Solnit focuses on a dedicated sliver of the spectrum, carefully exploring its tints and associations, my musical setting inhabits a limited world of possible sounds: timbres and dynamics are mostly muted, the vocal register is restrained, as is the palette of pianistic gestures. A recurrent sensation of slowing and distancing is veiled with lush and resonant harmonies. The challenge for interpreters is to flousrish within these constraints, to delve into the expressive nuances of a limited range of color, illuminating many subtle, distinct shades...

I. Blue
The world is blue at its edges and in its depths. The blue is the light that got lost.

II. Light
Light at the blue end of the spectrum does not travel the whole distance from the sun to us. It disperses among the molecules of the air, it scatters in water.

Deep water is full of this scattered light, the purer the water, the deeper the blue. The sky is blue for the same reason, but the blue at the horizon, the blue of land that seems to be dissolving into the sky, is a deeper, dreamier, melancholy blue, the blue at the farthest reaches of the places where you see for miles, the blue of distance.

This light that does not touch us, does not travel the whole distance, the light that gets lost, gives us the beauty of the world, so much of which is in the color blue.

III. Color
The color of that distance is the color of an emotion, the color of solitude and of desire, the color of there seen from here, the color of where you are not. And the color of where you can never go.

Blue is the color of longing for the distances you never arrive in, for the blue world.

IV. Longing

The distance between us and the object of desire fills the space in between with the blue of longing.

If you can look across the distance without wanting to close it up, if you can own your longing in the same way that you own the beauty of that blue that can never be possessed?

This longing will only be relocated, not assuaged, by acquisition and arrival, just as the mountains cease to be blue when you arrive among them and the blue instead tints the next beyond...

Some light does not make it all the way through the atmosphere, but scatters. Something is always far away.

V. Far
But in this world we actually live in, distance ceases to be distance and to be blue when we arrive in it.

The far becomes the near, and they are not the same place. The far seeps in even to the nearest. After all we hardly know our own depths. VI. Distance

From miles up in the sky, the land looks like a map of itself. The oxbows and mesas out the windows are anonymous, unfathomable, a map without words... terrain without scale, the near and the far folded into each other. These nameless places awaken a desire to be lost, to be far away, a desire for that melancholy wonder that is the blue of distance.

VII. Lost
Some things we have only as long as they remain lost, some things are not lost only so long as they are distant.

(Text from Rebecca Solnit's A Field Guide to Getting Lost, used by permission of the author;

Cover image by Horace-Bénédict de Saussure - Matériel de recherche, Horace-Bénédict de Saussure deuxième schéma du cyanomètre, 1788 Collection Musée d’histoire des sciences, Geneva, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=55643584)