Program Notes

Program notes by Roger Marsh

BERNARD RANDS (b. 1934)
Canti Trilogy

"The human voice, possibly the most subtle, complex, flexible, fragile and persuasive carrier of musical ideas and meanings, has always been an inspiration for and influence upon my entire musical thinking. In the Canti Trilogy, literary texts (poetic virtuosity) interact with vocal and instrumental capacities (musical virtuosity) to create not a setting of words to music but a labyrinth of relationships and connections - sometimes simple, even elementary and clear; sometimes complex and mysterious." - Bernard Rands

One of the most respected and successful composers working in the United States today, Bernard Rands has built up a catalogue of work reflecting a lifetime of engagement with modern musical and literary ideas. Symphony audiences around the world know him as a composer with an infallible ear for sonority and his prowess as an orchestral composer has been reflected in his seven-year association as Composer-In-Residence with the Philadelphia Orchestra and in the large number of commissions and performances by leading orchestras in many countries. Even more fundamental, however, to the composer's creative identity, is the part played by vocal music in his large and diverse output.

Works from the late 1960s and early 70s reflect Rands' evolving concern to convert linguistic properties into musical analogs, principally in a series of Ballads: Ballad 1 exploring the vocal behavior found in a nightclub setting; Ballad 2 in a Lieder recital;
Ballad 3 in worship.  Metalepsis 2 for solo mezzo-soprano, six amplified voices and ensemble arranges texts from the Requiem Mass, fragments from the sayings of Chairman Mao (in several languages) around a central text - Hymn to Steel - by the English writer John Wain.

By analyzing the linguistic elements of a text, Rands creates models for musical articulations, timbre, contour and dramatic polyphony. Crucial influences on his creative development have been the work of James Joyce and Samuel Beckett. An important early work Wildtrack 2 for soprano and orchestra includes passages from Finnegans Wake and poems from Joyce's Chamber Music are the texts for the Monteverdian Canti d'Amor for chamber choir.  Beckett's work is referred to or used as text in many of Rands' pieces, often flagged up by evocative titles: "…among the voices…" ; "…in the receding mist…"; "…where the murmurs die…"; "…body and shadow…"; "…and the rain…". Memo 2 for solo trombone, one of a series of solo pieces (now 10 in number) is almost a literal musical transcription of Beckett's late play Not I.

The real matter here, as in all Rands' work, is the juxtaposition of small musical modules which are then constantly regrouped and recombined, so that each takes on a new meaning and function in the musical discourse as their language equivalents do in the work of Beckett. Over four decades Rands has refined and elaborated this process. The 2002 apokryphos - a 45-minute work for solo soprano, massive chorus and orchestra on texts from several books of the Apocrypha and poems in German by exiled Jewish poets - demonstrates Rands' complete mastery of his means and methods.

Composed between 1980 and 1993, Canti Trilogy reflects Rands' wide literary concerns and a deep understanding of the 42 chosen texts in five languages (English, French, German, Italian and Spanish) which constitute the three cycles -  Canti Lunatici (Moon Songs) for soprano; Canti del Sole (Sun Songs) for tenor, Canti dell'Eclisse (Songs of the Eclipse) for bass. Each of these exists in two versions - one for solo voice and orchestra, the other for solo voice and chamber ensemble - the six related works adding up to a performance time of some three hours. Acknowledgement of this massive and unique accomplishment is reflected in Canti Trilogy's many and regular performances making it part of the significant music literature of our time.

Each of the cycles follows a "narrative" progression. The 'moon' cycle moves from sundown to dawn beginning with Quasimodo's poem "Ed e subito sera" (And in no time it is evening.) The 'sun' cycle begins with sunrise and ends with the same Quasimodo poem. The 'eclipse' cycle, in contrast, comprises a more abstract progression - a journey from St. Francis's beatific acceptance of the divine order, through Milton's and Tasso's eclipse-inspired despair and doubt, concluding with Henry Vaughan's weary grief and resignation. The same Quasimodo poem stands at the halfway point, the very center of the cycle and, as in the two previous cycles, it is "suddenly evening" - but in this case, evening occurs at midday! Emily Dickinson's verse follows immediately: "Sunset at Night - is natural - But Sunset on the Dawn Reverses Nature…Jehovah's watch is wrong…."

In Canti Lunatici (1980) two principal cycles - one of text and one of musical definition - revolve at fixed but different rates, thus influencing each other and affecting the larger, complex form of the whole work.  First, the texts are chosen and ordered to suggest the waxing (the first seven poems), the full moon (the eighth poem) and the waning (the final seven poems) - a "narrative" which encompasses the extraordinary and unpredictable responses of the human psyche. The second cycle, that of musical parameters, elaborates the text "narrative" resulting at different times in clarity, obscurity, ambiguity, mystery and eccentricity. Rands has written: "It was never my aim to compose a song cycle for voice with instrumental accompaniment in which each song has its own musical and formal integrity. Rather the intention was to create a labyrinth of relationships by the compositional arrangement of the resources of voice, text, instrument and musical idea."

Canti del Sole, composed in 1983, arranges 14 poems in two groups of 7. The first group is delivered at a much faster rate that the second group, suggesting an urgency and relative brevity of the human experience of morning (until midday) compared with the experience of the period from midday until midnight. This latter, a more languorous, slower-moving, leisurely experience is captured as a succession of reflective texts and moods. Clearly this also evokes the human experience of lifespan from the brevity of childhood through the decades of adulthood.

The texts chosen for Canti dell'Eclisse are consistently of a dark mood. After the opening jubilant praise for the magnificence of the heavens, each subsequent poem reinforces the enveloping gloom toward the final eclipse - again a parallel to life's inevitable ending.

Taken as a whole, Canti Trilogy adds up to a powerful and moving musical experience. This is music that speaks directly, in a language of brilliant modernity, but a language which remains rooted in what the composer refers to as "the vernacular." The guiding force is always the poetry. From it emerges a warmth of color, rhythmic energy and musical cross reference in a dazzling display of technical virtuosity, but all in service of the "labyrinth of relationships" contained in the sequence of poems which Rands has lovingly assembled.

Copyright 2004 Roger Marsh

Roger Marsh is a composer and currently Professor and Head of Music at York University.