Project 12: My Text Life, Part 1

Autumn has arrived in Portland!

For the past week, I’ve been pretending to be a train and trying not to drive my partner off the rails with every train-related pun I could spout off (he can get pretty steamed about these things). So, with the puns aside for now, let’s get back on track!

I met briefly over Zoom with the three vivacious and spirited musicians that make up Bassless Trio, and—in the spirit of other works they’ve commissioned about quarantine from the perspective of pets and inanimate objects—we decided to do a piece from the perspective of the Portland Metro.

Since I’m working with text this week also, I will be splitting up this week's reflection into 2 posts. In this first post, I'll be discussing the text for both Week 4 and 5. Check back later this week to read more about the music from this past week!

Wrap-Up

Writing Your Own Text

If you know anything about my career, you know that I am passionate about collaborating with other artists. However, in general, I've always preferred to write my own texts.

Before I started writing music, I was very active as a poet and fiction writer. Throughout middle school and high school I journaled in poems, wrote fan fiction with my sister, wrote a ton of short stories, started a few bad novels and cringey plays, and read like crazy. As I started college, and music began to take over, I could never fully escape including stories and poetry in my music. I took creative writing, theatre, and film classes in addition to my music coursework (thank you, liberal arts education!), and continued writing music with sung/spoken text, an inspiring source text, or a narrative program. One of my most recent premieres was a chamber orchestra work with original text projected on-screen. Composers are often told to be wary of writing their own text, and if you don’t really write, this is good advice. But if you truly love other forms of creative expression besides music (whether it’s writing, visual art, dance, etc.), I think you should be able to incorporate them as needed!

Building the Text

When I started writing the text for this, I started by jotting down a few phrases or images I wanted to include. Some of these included:

-city noises missing

-from choo-choo to achoo-achoo

-trains not running in downtown during protest

-what do trains hear us say?

(-saxophonist wants “Careless Whisper” quote if possible)

-trains run whether there is 1 person or 50 people on board

-trains see us cry

-orange-fire sky

While I included a few details specific to Portland, I hoped that this would be a piece that could apply to any number of local trains or street cars. To try and “succinctly” capture (more on this later) the last year from a train’s perspective, I organized my text into four sections: life before quarantine, life during the lockdown, the day our train services downtown were stopped due to the protests, and a “present day.”

Each section has a similar text structure, starting with train and passenger sounds, then descriptions of the world from the train’s view, followed by some inner-monologue, and  a final “purpose statement.” Each of these sections is also divided by lines that repeat in every section.

Not only did this help highlight contrasts in the train’s day throughout the year, but gave a clear musical structure for the piece to follow. The use of repetition also meant that there was less new musical material for the group to learn, making it easier to put together. These built-in repetitions also meant that there was less pressure to repeat lines, since they would come up later anyway—meaning I could get through more text in a shorter amount of time.

Just One Little Problem...

However, the text is still four pages long. These pieces are only meant to be about 3-5 minutes, but I know composers who could make that last an hour (for example...me)! I felt confident when I started out that I could pace things appropriately in the time given, as I planned to have the vocalist and instrumentalists speak some of the text (for those who don’t know, spoken text usually takes less time to perform than text that is sung). However, the final version of the work clocks in at just over 7 minutes.

If this were a commission for a larger commitment like an orchestra, a film, an advertisement, a game, or even a play or musical, that could be a significant issue—2 minutes of additional music can take up a lot of resources, and I would have needed to cut the text down or found other ways to cut time.

Fortunately, one advantage of chamber music is that additional time is usually acceptable so long as it’s within reason! You certainly don’t want to hand in a 27-minute piece to a group who have commissioned an 8-minute piece without navigating that expansion together, but another minute or two is usually not significant enough to be worrisome. Sometimes the piece just needs to be longer!

A Few Text Tips!

In retrospect, the original plan I had for the piece would have been closer to 10-12 minutes, so getting the piece to 7 minutes was a big accomplishment! Here are a few ways I’ve found that can help you set more text-per-minute:

-Speaking, especially when it’s freely spoken rather than metered, can get you through text much faster

-Prioritize syllabic text setting (one note per syllable)

-When it works musically, you can use other musicians who don’t need their mouths to play. I wrote the text with planned interjections from the other ensemble members (which had the additional benefit of establishing the singer as the train and the musicians as everything else), and it really helped cut down time, since I didn’t need to wait for one person to breathe before moving on to the next bit of text.

-For whatever reason, find that writing in mixed meters (especially switching between 5/8, 6/8, and 7/8) lends itself to more syllabic vocal writing, helping you get more words-per-minute

Wind-Up

This week, I’ll be doing something a bit more unusual in that I’m working with someone else’s text!

Jannis Wichmann, a guitarist based in Germany, is giving what he calls a  “critical recital” on the voice and guitar works of John Dowland, in collaboration with vocalist, Marie Sophie Richter. Dowland is a prevalent and pervasive voice in the classical guitar community, yet many of the texts he sets include sexist, racist, and nationalistic views. Jannis’s recital will present Dowland’s original works alongside new settings and responses by living composers—the latter of which is tasked with highlighting and commenting on the problematic views of the texts.

We can rearrange the text, write a “response” text that includes Dowland’s words, or set his text as-is but use the musical setting to draw out these perspectives. The text I was given to respond to is called “Thinkst Thou Then By Thy Feigning,” which deals with a woman pretending to be asleep to avoid being intimate. Dowland’s version of the text states that by feigning sleep, she is actually making herself more attractive in her vulnerability, and makes him want to kiss her more. I’m looking forward to taking on the challenge of dealing with this text, and the added challenge of writing for guitar once more!

Wishing all of you the best of luck with what challenges you’re facing off with this week! Happy Monday!