Absolute Gift by Ned Rorem

Author:Ned Rorem
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Open Road Media

8. Song

What the world needs is a Society for the Promotion of Last Performances. In declaring a moratorium on The Hundred Masterpieces, the Society would reserve prizes for those artists who are the first to give the last hearings of Beethoven and Brahms. The prize money would go, of course, to new music. And since all living composers have a vested disinterest in standard programming they would prove useful in drawing up the rules.

Are composers really that bad off? Yes, some. American song composers are.

Vocal contours depend upon language and eventually give music a discernible national character. Vocal music is the source of non-vocal music, and speech inflection is the direct basis of all music of all cultures. So, since music resembles the speech of a nation, it also resembles the people. People therefore resemble their music.

In theory, the definitive interpreter of a country’s songs should be a singer from that country.

In “Our Music Now” I point out that America is a land of specialists in everything but song literature while Europe produces general practitioners in everything but song literature.

Voice students in Germany, France and Italy logically master the songs of their own language first, often to the lifetime exclusion of all songs from other countries; the great foreign singers sing primarily in their native tongue. Americans, illogically, learn songs in foreign languages first (languages which they neither speak nor think in), often to the exclusion of American—or even English—works, whose existence they ignore; the most famous American singers sing primarily in foreign tongues.

Famous Americans in local recitals during the current season have sung mostly in German. (One or two may throw in some token Ives learned under duress last year because of that composer’s big birthday.) They defend themselves. “Yes, but my Schumann is exemplary.” “Would you sing him in Munich?” “I wouldn’t dare.”

Fischer-Dieskau, as the exceptional European general practitioner, is more prepared than most Americans for giving an all-English-language program tomorrow.

Recitals by opera stars? These are not recitals but bouquets of airs cut down to piano size. “I’d far rather do lieder,” declares the American diva, “but my fans demand arias.” Fans take what they’re given. And divas, despite their protestations, sing what they believe in. Alas, since they also believe in fans, the circle turns vicious.

Evelyn Lear, biting hands that fed her, repeatedly states: “Thank God my coach forced me to give up modern stuff, it almost ruined my voice. Composers should take lessons if they want to learn to write grateful vocal music.”

But Callas and Tebaldi ruined their voices on standard stuff. Meanwhile, that tiny handful of specialists—Beardslee, Curtin, Gramm, Wolff—sound better than ever after decades of doing contemporary music along with their “grateful” programs. That’s because they don’t treat modern music as modern music, but as music. No music of any period, if a singer believes in it, can harm the voice. (But aren’t those broad jumps of Mozart and high dives of Bach riskier than anything Stravinsky ever penned?)

As for composers taking singing lessons, that would only reveal their own limitations rather than another’s possibilities.

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