Kirke Mechem

Kirke Mechem is the composer of more than 250 published works in almost every form. ASCAP registered performances of Mechem's music in 42 countries last year. He conducted and taught at Stanford and was for several years composer-in-residence at the University of San Francisco. He lived in Vienna for three years where he came to the attention of Josef Krips, who later championed Mechem's music as conductor of the San Francisco Symphony. Vocal music is at the heart of Mechem's work. He has been called the "dean of American choral composers."

Seven Joys of Christmas (Catalog No. 2709) , composed nearly 40 years ago, remains one of the most popular holiday pieces in the ECS catalog.

At the heart of choral music is a paradox. A choral piece shapes and is shaped by its text, but because audiences rarely understand the words, they usually hear and judge the piece as pure music.

This paradox represents a double trap for composers. If we obsess on the text, squeezing disparate musical imagery and emotion out of every line, the listener may hear only disjointed musical episodes. If we pay little attention to the text, focusing on the creation of a satisfying musical form, the result may be a disappointing disconnect between words and music.

Today's composers are more liable to fall into the first trap-obsessing on the text. I hear too many new choral pieces that lack musical organization. I'll return to this shortly with some advice on avoiding the text trap, but first let's consider some historical reasons for the modern ascendancy of words over music.

Choral texts today - in this article I am referring chiefly to shorter works - are often secular poems intended to be sung by secular choruses for concert audiences. In the "golden age" of choral music, the texts were more often sacred, sung by church choirs for church congregations. (English and Italian madrigals of the period were written for private singing, not for audiences.) What are the musical implications of the differences between sacred and secular texts?

Secular poems are more varied and less universally known than sacred texts. They may be about practically anything: love, nature, humor, death, morality, music-you name it. This lively variety invites more attention to the text than does one more "Gloria," "Kyrie" or psalm setting; the congregation already knows most of those texts. Another obvious reason that text has become more important today is that secular poems are usually sung by and for people who speak the language of the poem. Concert-goers are in general more curious participants than Sunday worshipers; they have paid for a ticket and expect to understand what's going on. (Another paradox: we know they won't get all the words, but we still expect them to.)

To be sure, choral composers are still writing sacred music. The results are excellent when gifted composers write new and beautiful settings of well known texts; they concentrate on the music just because the texts are so well known. The results are not so excellent when composers repeat the formulas of older periods, or set mawkish new texts to mawkish music. I find it interesting that in the serious choral field, many of the most popular pieces written in my lifetime have been those with well-known sacred texts, e.g. Alleluia (Thompson), O Magnum Mysterium (Lauridsen), Ave Maria (Biebl). These are touching works, not because of their text settings, but because their music is beautiful and skillfully constructed. (Remember: Bach and Handel sometimes paid little heed to words; they often used the same glorious music for different texts.)

These sacred pieces show one way to avoid domination by the text. But they do not interest me as much as today's secular choral music, which I believe offers more of an opportunity precisely because secular poetry is varied, full of character, and modern in its sensibilities, whether spiritual or worldly. But how often, after hearing a new setting, have we come away with the impression that the composer simply set the poem one line after another with no over-all musical plan?  This is not composition; it is a catalog of musical ideas: six melodies in search of a composition.

It is not beside the point to observe here that new operas have the same problem. It often seems that the producer, the director and the librettist have bullied the composer into abdicating his age-old right to be in charge-to compose an opera with dramatic musical forms. Here, too, we often end up with a parade of ideas without any substantial musical satisfaction. Great operas have been written to mediocre texts; none have been written with mediocre music, no matter how good the libretto. Likewise, no choral piece remains in the repertory because of its words.

We choral composers must also exercise dramatic control over our texts. We must not allow them to bully us into slavish obedience. True, some short poems are so perfectly constructed that the choral composer should simply set them "as is," perhaps as simple homophonic songs. Even so, the music will not sound as perfect as the poem unless the composer's skill in creating a cohesive, integrated work is as great as the poet's.

Recently I decided to put to a test my belief in the primacy of music in choral composition. I wrote a Suite for Chorus, subtitled Songs Without Words, four pieces that use wordless vowels and consonants in somewhat the same way string music uses various bow strokes and pizzicato (not a new idea). While I took great pains to compose the work specifically for choral singers, I had no text to fall back on for emotional content or formal organization. I had only the devices that composers of instrumental music have (which are considerable): melodic and motivic invention, development, repetition, variation, suspense, climax, contrast, unity, variety-and tried to create a satisfying musical journey. For younger composers, and also for experienced choral composers who may suspect that words have been bullying their music, I heartily recommend this kind of wordless discipline. Please don't misunderstand me. I am not advocating that you try to pour your text into a conventional musical form such as sonata, rondo, or ABA . (Although I could give you successful examples of all of these, I could also give you disastrous examples.)

Please allow me now to try to help the young choral composer avoid the text trap. My first published choral pieces were written more than a half-century ago; I have learned from my own mistakes and from the successes and mistakes of others. But I can not presume to tell anyone how to write a good choral piece. This is how not to write one. Good composers - and there are many of them today - can write fine pieces in countless ways, including, perhaps, by ignoring what I am saying. I am only passing on what I have learned.

If I have spoken of a "text trap," don't think for a minute that I believe the text is unimportant. That is where the choral composer begins, and where the choral conductor ought to begin. But to write choral works with musical integrity, our first task is to understand the several kinds of structure in the poem we are going to set, especially the inner, psychological structure on which we will build our musical form. Since the wrong poem may doom us right from the start, our real first task is to choose the poem. I sometimes look at several hundred before finding the right one. Whenever I find a promising poem I put it into a file, where later it may turn out to be just what I want. (E. A. Robinson's poem, "Richard Cory," had been in my file forty years before I found an appropriate place for it last year in a cycle, An American Trio.)

How do you tell a good poem for choral music from a bad one? First, you have to love it. Poems and music live in the emotions. If you feel no emotion for a poem, neither will your singers or listeners. But not all poems you love will make good choral pieces. Difficult philosophical poems are not good candidates. Choosing poetry is highly subjective, but I'll venture a few observations, keeping in mind that we are looking for texts that invite musical translation. (It truly is translation; the poem is being transferred from one language to another. Good translators respect the idiomatic and structural differences between languages.)

(1) I like direct, simple diction. Singing is an elemental experience. How much stronger, simpler and more natural is the word "stop" than its more learned synonyms, "hinder," "cease," "desist." The poetry of the King James Bible, with its short Anglo-Saxon words that we have spoken all our lives, is much more natural and satisfying to sing than are revised, accurate, scientific versions. I stay away from even great poems whose language is obscure for any reason. If you have trouble understanding a poem when reading it, think how impossible it will become when submerged in choral counterpoint. Complex ideas severely limit musical development because they are already dense. (Complex and profound are not the same thing; a poem may be profound but simple.)

 (2) Short poems give a composer the most latitude for musical metamorphosis. Look at The Messiah: Handel broke up the long text into very short segments. "And with His stripes we are healed" is a five-page piece built on just seven words. Thompson's Alleluia, one word. But I see composers today choosing texts a page long for a three-minute choral piece. Has a law been passed against repeating words? Or do these composers believe that if the text is printed in the program, the audience won't notice the absence of musical continuity? (Some opera composers nowadays make the same mistake in relying on super-titles to keep the audience interested. Titles are helpful for older operas in foreign languages-those operas had musical integrity to start with-but super-titles do not supply musical drama where there is none.)

(3) The poetic quality-imagery-naturally attracts composers. This, however, is obvious; I don't think many composers are apt to choose poems that don't "sound" musical. There may be such a thing, however, as too much imagery. I have rejected poems that had so many references to sounds, instruments, noises that I was afraid music would be redundant. This kind of text sorely tempts the composer just to chase the words around. There are brilliant exceptions, but these texts don't often appeal to me. The only poem of this kind I have ever set was suggested by the commissioning chorus: "Pied Beauty" by Gerard Manley Hopkins.

I was against it, but careful study gradually engendered enthusiasm and stretched my horizon. I was well aware, however, that with such a text I would have to be particularly careful to provide a musical structure to support all the jingling and jangling, so the piece turned out pretty well. It is the finale of my cycle, The Children of David : Five Modern Psalms . (I chose to use a recurring long line as a kind of ritornello, a scaffold on which to hang the bursts of color.)

(4) Poetic diction is related to imagery, but is different. It is definitive in the poem and should be honored in the musical setting. Fine lyric poets are masters of poetic diction. What composer could resist the inherent music in "Let It Be Forgotten," by Sara Teasdale (1884-1933), which I used in the cycle, The Winds of May:

Because of the poem's simplicity and repetitions, a composer can build polyphonic music upon it without threatening the listener's comprehension, and without obscuring the quiet but heartbreaking emotion of the poem.

I learned a good lesson about poetic diction from my father, a fine poet, many of whose poems I have set. When I was considering "Pied Beauty," he pointed out how effectively Hopkins had alternated short, fast sounds with long, slow ones, particularly in the line "Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)". Most of the poem glories in the quick sounds of "dappled things," making the sudden long sounds all the more effective. The composer must be aware of this kind of music within a poem and make the most of it.

(5) Musical structure. Here we return to what I believe is the crux of the matter. I said earlier that to write choral works with musical integrity, our first task is to understand the several kinds of structure in the poem we are going to set. Structure in poetry can include the pattern of lines, meter, rhythm, or stanzas (couplets, tercets, quatrains) or the larger fixed forms, such as the sonnet, ballad, limerick, sestina, etc. You will also find invented forms, variations of fixed forms, and free verse. We must recognize these forms when we set them, but our musical form will best be determined by another kind of structure-what I have called the psychological or dramatic structure of a poem. (Granted that simple repetitive stanzas may sometimes require music that sticks close to the poetic structure, this need not be a restriction; good composers can conjure countless variations out of simple ideas.) To find this dramatic structure, we need to analyze the poem, observing the location of climaxes, of repose, of suspense, tension, changes of mood, returns to previous allusions or moods (with or without the same words.)

As an example, look back at Teasdale's poem, "Let It Be Forgotten." Study it as if you were going to set it for chorus. Take note of all the elements mentioned above and anything else that strikes you as a clue for your composition. After you have done this, go on to the following observations I am offering about the poem's possibilities for music.

The poem, it seems to me, is permeated with sadness, resignation, acceptance, and above all, a sense of the passing of time: "forgotten," "for ever and ever," "timeŠwill make us old," "long and long ago," "long forgotten snow"-these are all of a piece. The first four words, "Let it be forgotten," form the motif of the poem. To an unusual degree, this motif suffuses the entire work. This suggests the use of some musical motif-one with the potential for variation. I would also consider the use of one of the old modes to convey and heighten the sense of a bygone time. (I used Phrygian.)

The first three lines of the poem belong together; they are enlargements of the motif. Beginning with the second half of the first line, "as a flower is forgotten," this section seems to call for lyrical expression because of the alliteration, the flowing vowels, and particularly the phrase, "singing gold." Modulation might direct the flowing movement toward a new musical goal. An imitative texture could be derived from the motif, giving the composer an opportunity for a gentle rise and fall in the vocal range and dynamics.

The fourth line, however, is very different in its diction. The flowing movement stops. Read it aloud and you will see that its sounds are longer. "Time is a kind friend, he will make us old." This does, indeed, require more time, and demands a new musical treatment. It is a chance for variety, but you do not have to give up unity. You can change the texture, but retain some important element of the first section-a rhythmic pattern, for instance, or continue the atmosphere of your old modality. This fourth line is also a summing-up of the first stanza; it suggests a full cadence-most definitely not a half cadence-but not in the home key.

Is there anything remarkable about the first line of the second stanza, "If anyone asks"? This strikes me as the only time the author steps outside her omniscient point of view and becomes personal for a brief, but revealing moment. One voice part could sing this line alone. But the final words of the line, "say it was forgotten," lead back to the motivic idea, but are not quite the same. This is a chance to return to the lyrical melody, perhaps with imitation, but varied. The elongation of the words "long and long ago," echoing the "ah" sound in "forgotten," is made to order for singers. It is also made to order for composers who are trying to unify their piece in the same way the poet has unified hers. It doesn't take a genius to see that these words can be set to the motif in long notes as counterpoint to the lyrical lines.

For the ending of the poem you have surely noticed that the poet brings back the flower and fire images, extending the "f" alliteration with "a hushed foot-fall." The last line of the poem, "In a long forgotten snow," returns to the key word of the motif, "forgotten." I have often said that Sara Teasdale must have loved music, because she made her poems so easy for composers to set. Here she has given us the opportunity for recapitulation of several melodic elements from the first stanza, as well as the golden chance to end our piece with the same motif that began it.

Unfortunately, not many poems are so composer-friendly. And I hasten to add that my analysis is not the only one possible. Every poem is open to different interpretations. I would guess, moreover, that most experienced composers make this kind of analysis intuitively. (Writing this down was harder than composing the music.)

But whether the poem we choose is composer-friendly or not, the important thing is that we remain true to its psychological/dramatic form, rather than to its outer structure. No two sonnets share exactly the same dramatic structure any more than do any two sonatas. By discovering the structure that lies within the poem, you will be well on your way to finding the right musical structure. Only when that becomes clear should the composer begin to write music. The music itself will alter, modify and enrich your original concept, but rarely should you let it beguile you into giving up your concept entirely.

This seems like a good place to leave young composers-at work writing music with a good idea of the shape their work will take. They surely know, however, that their choral piece will not be judged by its shape, which will be as invisible to most listeners as is the steel infrastructure that holds up the concert hall. Nor will it be judged by its text. The piece will be judged by the beauty and the character and the originality of its melodies and harmonies, and by the skill of the poem's translation to the choral medium. We wouldn't be composers if we did not happily accept that challenge. I hope that my suggestions may help my younger colleagues look at a poem as the framework for an imaginative musical form, not as a straitjacket. Choral composition should not be the musical equivalent of painting by numbers.

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