WILLIAM WORDSWORTH: SHE DWELT AMONG THE UNTRODDEN WAYS She dwelt among the untrodden ways Beside the springs of Dove, A maid whom there were none to praise And very few to love: A violet by a mossy stone Half hidden from the eye! - Fair as a star, when only one Is shining in the sky. She lived unknown, and few could know When Lucy ceased to be; But she is in ber grave, and, oh, The difference to me! JAMES JOYCE: STRINGS IN THE EARTH AND AIR (from Chamber Music) Strings in the earth and air Make music sweet; Strings by the river where The willows meet, There's music along the river For Love wanders there, Pale flowers on his mantle, Dark leaves on his hair, All softly playing, With head to the music bent, And fingers straying Upon an instrument.
Two Songs in Olden Style (1960) were written in the same period as Nocturnals 1 & 2, and 2 Dumas (all for piano solo), between 1958-60). I was at that time in the midst of a serious conversion to serial principles if not orthodox serialism (the first three issues of the English translation of Die Reihe were available and I literally devoured No. 2 on Webern). As a piano student of Earle C. Voorhies at the Los Angeles Conservatory of Music and Arts (now California Institute of the Arts) I had included in my solo repertoire Schoenberg's Op. 19 and 33a, Anton Webern's Variations, as well as works by Bartok, Hindemith and Stockhausen (Klavierst.ck No. 9). My teacher of composition, Morris H. Ruger had composed his Piano Sonata No. 2 for me, which I later recorded. At the same time, Ruger did not totally approve of serialism or atonality. So I decided to compose something clearly tonal and very melodic; something that would, at the same time, show the same seriousness as my more "advanced" efforts and satisfy Schoenberg's sly remark that "there was plenty of good music still to be written in the key of C Major" (the sins of youth have their privileges). I was looking for a poetic duet of contrasts, a kind of strophic Il Penseroso and LoAllegro. Wordsthworth and Joyce seemed to fulfill that requirement, and, in addition, I loved the two poems and knew them by heart.
She Dwelt Among the Untrodden Ways begins with a definite bow towards the region of tonal ambiguity of the "untrodden ways" . actually a nice little hexachord. The piece is to be performed almost continually sotto voce (a private grief). Joyce's Strings in the Earth and Air is a kind of spinning song, joyful and tremulously exuberant. But here, too, the dynamics should be gentle (leggiero), for the singer as well. Even the final accelerando and crescendo in the piano is only to a forte (and not fortissimo!).
For many years I kept the songs in a drawer. In the early 1980s I rescued a small collection of works from the 1957-63 period and put them in a folder titled "Sins of my youth" (pace Rossini). In 1990 I incorporated She Dwelt Among the Untrodden Ways into the coda of the first movement of my Piano Concerto (1990-93). The following year I re-edited the two songs into their present shape (I made no revisions in the music; all changes were editorial: clarifying dynamics, pedaling, fermatas, etc.) and dedicated them to Lucy Shelton.
I remember vividly that writing these two songs convinced me that the gravitation pull of tonality had to be present in everything I write, even if only as a sub-text. The examples of Alban Berg, the late Webern and Frank Martin (and later Messiaen) helped me through this crisis in the early 70s. This principle has guided me throughout such harmonically dense works as "Sculptured Birds", Partita for Three Piano and Three Trombones" and Nocturnal No. 5. In rediscovering these early songs, I rediscovered my early struggles that never left me.