Recording by Connor Gibbs and John Waynelovich
Like many a young person engaged in the pursuit of music, I became enthralled with the poetry of Gertrude Stein. Actually that may not be so common an occurrence. Whatever, it should be or maybe at least could be? In any case I was.
Fortunately I lived near a library at that time, a college library. Fortunately further this library had in its collection Yale’s eight volumes of posthumous works by Gertrude Stein. While thumbing through these volumes I came across her A Birthday Book which consisted of a “birthday” poem written for every day of the year. I use quotes around “birthday” because many of the poems had little that was birthday-like about them.
As with any poem I began reading from the beginning. January the first, obviously. About halfway through January I realized that there was not a narrative thread connecting the days together (actually there are instances of pairs of consecutive days referring to each other but the point of there not being an overall narrative remains) and being impatient I then jumped to my birthday to see what it said. And then to other birthdays and special days of the calendar.
After reading through the rest of the poem like this I felt a little guilty about not preserving the “narrative integrity” of the poem but then realized that most people would probably do the same as I had done. Surely the curiosity and the need to feed your own ego with your special birthday poem would compel you to jump ahead and find your own birthday’s poem? It’s a purely natural response.
There was another interesting quality of this poem that drew me to it. It started out strong with over ten lines for each of the first few days of January, but as the poem went on the poems became shorter and shorter. To the point of just being a few words for each day. As an artist I had experienced this myself many times. I would start off really strong composing all sorts of wonderful bits of music but then as the work progressed I would tire of it and the stuff at the end would suffer. Of course the trick to being an artist is to keep going back and working on those un-fun bits until the quality of the later stuff matches that of the early effort. Or you give up and don’t release the work.
Which is what I had assumed happened in this instance. Stein saw that she really dropped the ball and not feeling the need to fix it she did not publish the poem during her life. Of course we cannot know that this was the reason it was not published while she was alive but it makes for a good story.
Based on these two insights I decided to set this poem to music. When reading Stein you are struck by how similar her writing is to that of the musical minimalists like Glass, Reich, Riley, etc. Stein’s poems are very rhythmic employing lots of repetition and homophones while slowly introducing subtle changes or variations. If that ain’t the definition of minimalist music then I don't know what is.
So of course setting her poetry to minimalist music was the obvious course of action. To this end I managed to get through some 20 days of poems with the music reflecting the poetic patterns of each poem. And then it hit me, this approach is exactly what a hack composer would do. Of course everyone notices the similarity to musical minimalism and so of course your average composer would think to use that approach. But I did not want to be your average composer. I wanted to go at it differently. Be original. Make it new.
Back to the drawing board I went. Which mainly comprised throwing out everything I had done and reassessing what it was that drew me to this poem in the first place. Of course it was the “random access” nature of the poem—the penchant on the part of the reader to jump around to the various days to see what that poem said. What I needed to do was come up with a piece that embodied that concept. Not just reflecting it in an obvious manner (like allowing the musicians to jump around the score performing the days in whatever order they wanted) but embedding it deeply into the process of performance.
Finally it came to me. I created a score with notes, the numbers 1-31, and the months of the year scattered about the page with the instructions that for whatever day a musician wanted to perform they would let their eyes wander over the page searching for the month and day all the while playing on their instrument whatever notes they came across during the journey. While this was happening the vocalist would read the poem for that day. Now we have a piece where the process of playing it reflects directly the “random access” of the experience of reading it.
A special thanks to Connor Gibbs who organized the recording linked to above. His enthusiasm for the piece and professionalism resulted in a spectacular performance. I highly recommend following him on his Youtube channel.
Copyright 2017 David Bellows