Edgar Allan Poe is certainly the patron saint of the American dark side. He offered a highly refined and public example of the fear, sorrow and neurosis bubbling along in American culture some 75 years after the

Revolution. He published abroad that things were not all sweetness and light in the American psyche, and he did it beautifully, thrillingly. Where else would one start a musical and poetic journey into the twisted corridors decaying in the American soul, but with the first American master of the gothic sensibility.

Excerpt from "The Sleeper" by Edgar Allan Poe

"The Sleeper" by George Crumb (1984)

on Poe’s text

"Annabel Lee" by Nils Vigeland (1995)

on Poe’s text

Poem: "A Dream Within a Dream" by Edgar Allan Poe

Poem: "The Land of Fear" by Demetrios Capetanakis

Excerpt from "Preludes for Memnon" by Conrad Aiken

on Poe’s text

To invite the audience into a dark and stormy night frame of mind we begin this program with a spoken excerpt from Poe’s "The Sleeper," a beautifully detailed description of the tomb of the beloved Irene. The poet had an intense obsession with the death and burial of beautiful women. This had been triggered by the loss of women close to him in his own life. He felt these losses keenly and transformed his sorrow, often with the help of opium, into poetry of strange and original beauty. The stage set by his words, we follow with an odd and evocative piece by George Crumb that uses short portions of this text. Crumb uses extended techniques for both voice and piano – cries and whispers for the singer and strumming and plucking for the pianist. These elements evoke in us a sense of the bereft, the empty, the horrified lover and serve to create a truly Gothic atmosphere. Into this we introduce Nils Vigeland"s direct and emotional setting of Poe’s "Annabel Lee" where we hear the heartfelt longing of the young lover whose beloved has died and left him with a sorrow as overwhelming as the unremitting pounding of the sea. The qualities of beauty and horror, terror and passion that Poe’s work so typifies create a feeling of mystery and uncertainty perfect for continuing our journey into the dark of the American psyche.

In his long life John Duke wrote almost two hundred songs, these six, written from 1924-1965, have a late 19th century feel in their style, but use an interesting and sophisticated musical language to set some very moody and some very funny poems by a variety of poets. Poetry by women figures prominently in this program, among Duke’s songs and the songs of Ned Rorem we find Sara Teasdale, Jessica Jackson, Elizabeth Bishop, Adrienne Rich and Emily Dickenson among others. I very much enjoyed the fact that it was often women’s texts that were particularly harrowing. Ned Rorem’s songs written from 1957 to 1975 are small works of great intensity dealing with death and madness. His musical language is various and highly dramatic, creating moments of exquisite melodic and harmonic beauty around stark, brutal emotions. In researching songs for this program, I found myself struck again and again by the way in which passion denied, abused, allowed to fester can drag a person over the edge into madness. A person in an extreme and agonizing emotional state can long for its end so intensely that he can barely recognize the transition from life to death.

Finding a textual link to take us from Rorem to Christopher Vassiliades’ wild setting of Poe’s "The Bells" (which calls for the singer to play percussion) took me through a great deal of wonderful 20^th century American poetry. Finally Conrad Aiken’s "Preludes for Memnon" offered just the right combination of images and emotions. In the midst of the high drama of the other works a moment of homely horror, a winter evening in a comfortable room feeling the presence of death makes us pause and consider our mortality, the fear of which is at the root of all Gothic writing.

"The Bells" is a poem about a descent into madness accompanied by and, indeed, driven by the clamor of the bells. I find it very descriptive of the noisy overload of our modern lives. Vassiliades’ work realizes this madness with dramatic clarity and serves as a superb destination for our dark American journey.

While it deals with subjects ominous and forbidding, "American Gothic" has humor and lyricism as well as a continuous energy that keeps the audience engaged and, indeed, often on the edges of their seats. I look forward to developing still other "editions" of this fascinating concert format.

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