Somewhere To Get To
Somewhere To Get To (Arsis
Audio CD117)
Music of Rodney Lister
Notes by Paul Driver
This sequence of songs and chamber pieces presents a portrait of an artist whose influences range across both sides of the Atlantic, embracing such British figures as Britten, Peter Maxwell Davies and Michael Finnissy, and an American collection including Ives, Copland, Virgil Thomson, Arthur Berger, Milton Babbitt and perhaps those 1930s left-wing figures, Stefan Wolpe, Marc Blitzstein and Ruth Crawford Seeger. To Lister's own political strain must be added his practising Christianity, his ardent interest in literature, and his wide experience as a performer and teacher of music, if we are to begin to pin down his distinctive sensibility.
For all his openness to stimuli he is very much his own man, practising the compositional life in his own way, writing a little most days, and writing for the people around him. There is a sort of Schubertian festivity about the way he involves his acquaintanceship in his art. Friends and colleagues saunter through his oeuvre in the form of dedications and birthday tributes; and his evident conviction that music should be written for use has far more in common with Britten's humble, perhaps Anglican, desire to serve the community, than with anything like Hindemith's need to inundate us with Gebrauchmusik.
The viola-and-piano duo, The Bear's Lullaby (1993), was written for use at Greenwood Music Camp in Western Massachusetts, where Lister is a tutor, and written on site. My little house, he says, is in the middle of the woods, and I was always afraid that, on my way home late at night, I would run into a rabid raccoon or, worse, a bear. Rather than registering alarm, this brief, hypnotic movement seeks to lull any hostile presence into a sense of musical security. Lister takes Fauré's violin-and-piano Berceuse as a source, but his musings on its pattern of notes produces something closer to a Satie Gymnopédie.
A Little Cowboy Music, commissioned by Toby Armour for performance the at the public library in Somerville, Mass, as part of the 1980 National Library Week, is scored for B-flat clarinet, violin, contrabass and piano, and is a quodlibet. This Latin word translates as what you please, and denotes a light-hearted piece in which several popular tunes or fragments are ingeniously combined, whether horizontally, vertically or both. The finale of Bach's sublime Goldberg Variations is a quodlibet, one of whose tunes (fitting into the harmonic framework of the theme) is the distinctly unsublime Kraut unde Rüben or Cabbages and Turnips.
In A Little Cowboy Music Lister deftly juxtaposes and combines no fewer than seven tunes of a traditional American character: The Streets of Laredo, Good Bye, Old Paint, Green Grow the Lilacs, The Ballad of Jesse James, Red River Valley, Home on the Range, and the Roy Rogers television show theme, Happy Trails to You, familiar to him as a small child. As befits a commission for a library, the work exhibits plenty of book-learning in the way it exploits the unlikely contrapuntal possibilities of this material, yet the result has a definite outdoor breeziness.
With its outrageous Ivesian, and indeed Finnissian, overlays, the piece is a great deal of fun, but there is more to it than that. A buried poignancy and even pain is hinted at by the words to Red River Valley that Lister has written in the score below the violin part near the end: Come and sit by my side if you love me, / Do not hasten to bid me adieu, / But remember the Red River Valley / And the girl that has loved you so true.
Word-setting proper is a preoccupation for which Lister has a Britten-ish fondness: he is a prolific composer of songs, part-songs and cantatas, and his choice of texts is a constant surprise. Milhaud extracted a song-cycle text from a catalogue of agricultural machinery, so perhaps Lister is not being all that offbeat in setting a recipe. The recipe for the late Mama Stamberg's Cranberry Relish (1999) as notated by her daughter-in-law Susan Stamberg - is, we are told, the one that SOUNDS terrible, but TASTES terrific : Lister makes of it a delightful little parody of a baroque cantata. At the same time he evokes the deadpan manner of a writer dear to his heart, Gertrude Stein.
Also for soprano and piano is Everness (1990), a setting of Richard Wilbur's translation of a poem by Jorge Luis Borges suggesting that nothing that happens is ever lost. Oblivion does not exist because God saves everything, however insignificant. Even the transient images in mirrors are part of that diverse crystalline memory, the universe; and Lister's piano writing with its detached and dissonant, reverberant chords well catches the crystalline quality.
Adding a mezzo-soprano to the same combination is The Birds (2000), a masterly treatment of a little Hillaire Belloc poem in which the infant Jesus makes living birds out of clay. This gently rocking music is written entirely with the white notes of a keyboard, except for a single acccidental. On the first of its two occurrences, the word Paradise is allocated an F sharp, clashing with a G below, and pain of our earthly longing for such an estate is instantly suggested. On the word's second appearance this pain has been slightly assuaged, though there is still a harsh interval that of a tritone, the diabolus in musica - between the voices. The interval is softened first to a perfect fourth, then to a perfect fifth, by the echoing mezzo. The song enfolds within its three-minute span a whole metaphysic.
Of Mere Being (1993-2000) is a gradually assembled cycle of five poems by Wallace Stevens, set for soprano and piano, though also conceived as choral pieces. The first song, a declamatory setting of the verse inscription to Stevens's extended Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction, is marked bold and ardent, but the cycle's characteristic manner is indicated by the quietly moving tempo of the next setting, A Clear Day and No Memories. Using gentle speeds and his gently roving diatonic harmony, Lister memorably captures the wry transcendentalism of Steven's work, epitomized by the last line of The Snow Man, where the snow-listener beholds Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.
From high-minded Stevens to A.A. Milne is a literary leap that bothers Lister not at all. The solo piano piece, Sure of You (1994), takes its title from this exchange in Winnie-the-Pooh: Piglet sidled up to Pooh from behind. Pooh, he whispered. Yes, Piglet? Nothing, said Piglet, taking Pooh's paw, I just wanted to be sure of you. The piece, marked pensive, is another musical search for security, another Bear's Lullaby perhaps.
The Repetitive Heart (1985) for solo violin (originally written for solo viola), is a rather more ambitious affair. After a tiny prelude featuring that interval of the tritone, the player embarks on a study of a repeated rhythm - a dotted eighth-note followed by an eighth-note that Lister came across when playing John Cage's The Wonderful Widow of Eighteen Springs, a work for voice and closed (i.e. tapped) piano. When the figuration has become more elaborate, the prelude returns and is amplified into an impassioned melody. Pulsing figuration and expressive melody then alternate, with further appearances of the prelude, until the latter turns satisfyingly into a codetta.
Lister says that the piece is about the beating of the (my) heart and the subjective nature of the perception of time. And he reveals that it is all based on a tune by Tina Turner. Rather as he fiddled with the Fauré Berceuse, here he permutes the notes of Turner's What's Love Got to Do With It, using the sort of magic square number-grid that Maxwell Davies habitually employs to generate pitch-material out of plainsongs. Just before the end of the piece, the tune's end is quoted directly, the words at this point being who needs a heart when a heart can be broken.
Davies's influence is evident in Somewhere to Get To (1996) in what Lister calls the little isorhythmic motets that form interludes between four settings of W.H. Auden. This work originated in Lister's desire to write a piece marking Milton Babbitt's 80th birthday, and do so in a way that would allow him to end with a quotation of the end of a Babbitt work he loves and has often played, Composition for Viola and Piano. To ensure an organic connection between the works, he drew a pair of six-note tunes from the Babbitt to use as material. An association in his mind between the Babbitt and Auden's poetry specifically Musée des Beaux Arts, the final setting was purely subjective, but out of such serendipity is art created.
The song-cycle is scored for the Pierrot lunaire combination of flute, clarinet, violin, cello, voice and piano, and is notable both for its formal continuity the flow of songs and instrumental passages recalls that of Britten's vocal-orchestral Nocturne and for the distinctness of the various treatments. In Their Lonely Betters the voice is set in relief against what Lister thinks of as birds and bees music. In The More Loving One the violin imitates a mandolin. The third setting, Lister says, is a monodic recitation whose accompaniment consists mainly of the notes of the tune prolonged. The fourth is modeled on Elizabethan viol fantasias. Between the second and third songs is a wonderful expressionistic rendering of a storm - the one that the poet wakes to hear in First Things First. The work as a whole portrays the passing of a day, starting in late afternoon, moving through a still evening, and the night-time violence of the storm, to ending at dawn with the emergence of the Babbitt piece.
The remaining item, Blue Wine (1989), is the most unusual on the disc, and an example of melodrama in the strict sense: spoken words with a musical accompaniment. The text by the poet John Hollander already has a musical character, being a set of variations on a theme. Blue wine, and blueness itself, is considered in short sections that move overall from the meditative mode to the narrative and back again, and perhaps can be seen as a response to Wallace Steven's long poem, The Man with the Blue Guitar. Lister's music is self-effacing to the point of asceticism: elemental gestures, bare intervals, single notes, all free-floating in an open form. There is an exhilarating if sparely written climax evoking brightness of flame and flavescent gold, and a calmative hymn soon follows. Blue Wine may be a curious work, but it is unmistakably a reflection of Lister's sensibility.