songs of desire, love and loss
SONGS OF DESIRE, LOVE AND LOSS (2004), for soprano and chamber ensemble
Premiere: October 10, 2004, Dawn Upshaw Perspectives Series, Carnegie Hall; Weill Recital Hall, New York
Duration: 20’
Instrumentation: soprano and mixed ensemble [Flute, B b Clarinet (doubles E b and B b Bass Clarinets), Percussion, Piano, Violin, ‘Cello]
Program Note:
I came to Alan Dugan’s work through one of those sets of circumstances that in retrospect seems almost fateful. During a day spent browsing at a bookstore, two friends, one of whom had grown up with Dugan for a neighbor, bought me a copy of Poems Seven. As we sat and read them together I was pulled in by Dugan’s combination of emotional directness (often rawness) and complexity, apparently contradictory impulses that impel my work as a composer as well. It occurred to me that I might set a few of these to music at some future point, not suspecting that the Carnegie Hall commission would come only a few months later.
Part of what appealed to, and resonated with, me about Dugan’s work was the brute (and brutal) anger to which much of it gives voice, and which has drawn the most attention to him. In the end, though, I chose poems that show another side of his poetic persona. Although his trademark anger is often present, if only through an underlying tension and the suggestion of violence (eg. “blowing/monarchs to pieces” in the third song), these poems have, for me, a haunted-ness and occasionally even bitter-sweetness that makes them, for me, more conducive to a moderate-scale vocal work.
Poems Seven is a complete anthology of Dugan’s published work, which came out two years before his death last year. The poems I chose therefore span decades in their composition (Argument to Love as a Person stretches back to Poems Two, published in 1963), and were not originally intended to appear together. That said, they share similar themes (eg. the mutation of the spiritual to the fleshly – “the dove itself come down / to be the pigeon” in the first song, the soul as guest-at-an-inn in the second, the souls’ “fall to flesh” in the fourth), and images (eg. flowers, whether roses or rhododendrons) that made them fit together for me. In fact, it was ultimately possible — as well as being musically and dramatically advantageous — to arrange them into a quasi-narrative. It is a non-specific, generalized sort of narrative - outlining a development from desire, to love, to loss — and one with contradictory (or at least paradoxical) and “off-topic” branches and implications. Nevertheless, it gives structure and definition to the ordering of the songs, and is something I bore very much in mind while composing them.
– James Matheson