All About Love,
an email exchange with
Composer David Schiff

Classical Domain: Before we talk about All About Love, I want to ask some general questions.

Last year the Metropolis Ensemble performed your work, Singing in the Dark, for jazz saxophone and classical chamber orchestra. I thought it was one of the few examples I've heard were where both idioms work together and made a convincing and unified composition I found that the combination worked much better than many hybrid experiments I've heard in the past, it mixed contemporary music with jazz and allowed the soloist (jazz saxaphonist and composer Marty Ehrlich) to improvise and also accommodated the soloist his own voice as he played the notated music.

So now you presenting us with a work for voice and chamber orchestra, is this work the same mixture of the two idioms?

DS:    All About Love is a different kind of mix because all the performers are on the classical side and there is no improvisation. So the mix is more in the notes themselves and here I was thinking a lot about breaking down the walls between art song and popular song. I wanted to compose art song—based on pre-existing poetry and written for classical, un-miked singers — that would give the kinds of pleasures we expect in popular songs.

CD:    Can you talk a bit about how think about composing for the voice?

DS:    I've written a lot of vocal music, including a lot of synagogue music because my wife is a cantor. The voice is the warmest, most communicative, most vulnerable instrument and so for me it's at the very center of what music is all about. I could make a long list of singers who have completely knocked me out me over the years, but I'll just say that my ideal vocal performance is Sarah Vaughan doing My Funny Valentine. I started composing All About Love by taking poems I knew by heart and trying to hear them in Sarah Vaughan's voice.

CD:    Will the vocal style will be more identifiable as a jazz element?

DS:    Classical singers have a different technique than pop or jazz singers. I don't ask my singers to cross over but the music puts them in a zone where they may be able to learn a few things from the other side. The last song in the cycle is to a poem by Elizabeth Bishop, and I know her favorite singer was Billie Holiday. I certainly don't want the singer to imitate Billie Holiday here but I think that listening to Billie will help the singer with the song. And for the song based on Keats's sonnet I hope that my tenor will take a few hints from Tony Bennett.

CD:   One of the secrets of a good jazz singer (like Billie Holiday) is to stay behind the beat, can you notate that?

DS:    Notation is deceptive. If you try to notate an effect like this it will just lead to a fussy, nervous performance. But if the style of the music is right for a little rhythmic relaxation a good performer will do it.

CD:    Works in another language aside for the moment, for the songs in English; when we hear the work will it sound more like “American Song” or will it sound like European based American lieder?

DS:    I chose poems in English, French, Italian and Russian, as well as a section of Proust which I originally set in French and then translated into English, but I don't think any of it will bring the word “lieder” to mind. It's all American but in a lot of different ways, from the doo-wop of the Petrarch movement, to the blues of the Bishop. The Proust is French, but not in any way that Maestro Boulez would approve.

CD:    I'm wondering if we're just not used to operatic English, or is it because our popular way of singing is more emotionally real to us?

DS:    The great American song tradition is the popular song not art song or opera. Except for Porgy and Bess there is no American opera that has left much of an imprint. I didn't appreciate this from the lyrics side until I read Philip Furia's great book The Poets of Tin Pan Alley which really made me appreciate the artistry of Ira Gershwin, Lorenz Hart and the other great lyricists.

CD:   Is it a questions of popular taste?  Opera, we are told, captures great passion, though I might say, ordinary passion and makes it seem great. Popular song can have an emotional directness so it becomes personal, so smaller, but it seems to be how Americans want to hear their emotion.

DS:    I don't see these two genres as different in terms of what they are trying to communicate. Opera, though, is saddled with four hundred years of tradition which makes even the latest operas seem somehow stale, if not dead, on arrival. I think that Leonard Bernstein was right when he said that musicals were American opera. I don't understand why the many people who are commissioned to write operas today don't study shows like The Most Happy Fella, or Into the Woods, which have so much emotional range and theatrical know-how.

CD:   In Singing in the Dark you used a soloist who was an accomplished Jazz saxophonist and composer, but in this instance you're using a classically trained voice. What are the demands of the work and did you ever think what type of singer could “put the songs over” (in Tin Pan Ally parlance)

DS:    When I first proposed this cycle to David Shifrin at Chamber Music Northwest I told him that I wanted to write it for Audra MacDonald. Well that wasn't going to happen. But I find that great classical singers love to put a song over — given the chance.

CD:   You have a lot of experience getting jazz players to work with classical ensembles and classical player to express jazz idioms, what will the challenge be for the Metropolis Ensemble?

DS:    It's great to have an ensemble that is already familiar with my style. I usually tell players that if they are playing my music like “modern music” (uptight, precise, angular, cold) they are wrong. Metropolis caught on very fast when they played Singing in the Dark last February.

CD:   Ok, so to the work, What inspired the song cycle?

DS:    I started out with the idea of some kind of big vocal work that would end with a setting of Elizabeth Bishop's “One Art” which I think is the greatest poem in the language, and then the rest gradually fell into place. I wanted to have a balance of poems by women and men; and I also wanted to challenge myself with different kinds of texts so, in addition to the poems I picked out two of my favorite narrative passages from Melville and Proust. The Moby Dick section is longer and more varied than the settings of poems and the Proust turned into a ten minute opera. With Melville, Proust and Bishop in place the varieties of love now mixed gay and straight, but I wanted to use texts that exposed many different emotions related to love: infatuation, turmoil, rapture, jealousy, resignation — they are all there.

CD:   So some love that dare not speak its name, will would we know by the text, or is it all polymorphous?

DS:    There's nothing explicitly gay about the Bishop and Proust texts, though the “you” in Bishop is, biographically, another woman. And, biographically, a lot of the female characters in Proust were based on men. The Melville on the other hand celebrates a same sex marriage between Ishmael and Queequeg — it's one of the most amazing passages in all of American literature.

CD:   Elizabeth Bishop's “One Art” as a love poem seemed an odd choice, particularly in a larger cycle about love, what drew you to that?

It's an astonishing poem in so many ways from the villanelle form which gives it its own music to the slow insidious emotional crescendo as the word “lose” gradually turns into the word “love.” There was another draw, however. My teacher Elliott Carter set six of Bishop's poems in “A Mirror on Which to Dwell” — he was composing it while I was studying with him and I was at the premiere and the first recording session. I wanted to see how Bishop would come out in my style which is very far from Carter's, even though I'm sure that below the surface there still is a lot of his influence.

CD:   So now that you wrote this, what is love all about, anyway? I think you have to take a stand.

DS:    Didn't Freud say that everything comes down to either Love or Work? So Love must be everything we're thinking about when we're not working--and probably a lot of what we are thinking about when we are working as well. I'll stand by that.