Four Berlin Songs
Jason Thorpe Buchanan
for Soprano, Baritone, Fl, Ob/E.Hn, Vln, Vcl, Pno, Perc.
Four Berlin Songs by Jason Thorpe Buchanan (Program Notes from Fulbright Conference/Gala Concert premiere in 2011) The selections being performed this evening from Four Berlin Songs are initial sketches that will soon be expanded for chamber orchestra, with the addition of a fourth movement to complete the song cycle. This collaborative project was initiated when composer Jason Thorpe Buchanan, conductor Thomas Heuser, and poet Kate Thorpe first met as Fulbright fellows in Marburg, Germany in August of 2010. The potential subject matter for Kate's soon to be written poetry was discussed at length, exploring themes such as distance, time, memory, culture, and the creative process, as well as the role of art in modern society.
In later correspondence she described her interest in "making connections and erasing distinctions (new growth, life, oddness, distortion, re-seeing of the everyday world)" and "having a central strand that remains constant", for other ideas to "grow or be juxtaposed against.... I think of a spiral often-that you're in roughly the same place but further out/in-also different." In composing these songs, my intention was to retain Kate's idea of a spiral, where one remains at a fixed point spatially and observes their surroundings change, thus shifting perspectives while physically remaining in stasis. This principle is applied harmonically and thematically through polytonality and the superimposition of germinal pitch and rhythmic materials, while simultaneously retaining a strong sense of centricity.
I have found that the opportunity to write these songs has come at a stage in my life where, as an American composer living in Germany, my mind is constantly filled with thoughts, questions, and doubts regarding my own aesthetic values and national identity; feelings I imagine many of us experience during our time abroad. How can the familiar and unknown be reconciled-- the comfortable and the unsettling, the romantic and the avant-garde, the old and the new? These are questions that I have asked myself over and over again throughout the process of composing these works. My hope is that these issues are reflected in the musical atmosphere within which these songs exist, alongside the tension, fragmentation, decay, roughness, expression and space alluded to in Kate's poetry.
- Jason Thorpe Buchanan
Four Berlin Songs (Texts by Kate Thorpe) I. The Orchestra is not a scene
We thought
we could take a thing and run
but an idea is not concrete
while the streets of the buildings fade, big
branches
onto the pavement. It is evening
here where ideas fall into places over ideas
straight into a ball field. To get covered or buried? Cheap?
(A vacant street. A building to sleep in. To paint.)
A Kingdom for a stream? A beach we have made (really).
A branch for a day, a dream. A line (S3). To get into an idea
of a thing. A train? (Headed East.)
____________
III. Graffiti Ode
Then walls were made
out of walls for everyone,
taken out,
condensed to make sound, painted on and
we were like our
gods calling, yet tied
to the sea, concrete as the colors we feel, sing (a song lost
behind songs)--
we could not leave (and were always leaving), dangling
into the breeze
our memories-- fading?
and we were here (in our places). To return us
to our shore we
stood up in lines, in curves, at the anchor, bound to the stern, prophesied
in words.
[this is the color of the sea ]
____________
IV. A Boat
A dam is but a boat
to let us in where the water
is clean and calm in the wind.
A shore is but a shore
to land, a sea
a bridge to dam
*
& art makes holes
to reflect
"the mirror of the soul."
The stones only
