I am reminded of this quotation: “It is not enough to be right. You must prevail.” Let me rephrase that wording to fit here: “It is not enough to be creative. You must be heard.” Gwyneth Walker certainly fits into that principle, as she has become a successful composer first through talent (of course) but then through sheer hard work and business savvy. She has a very interesting website that includes some of the interviews and lectures she’s given over the years, and I was especially struck by her essay “Yes, This Is a Business!” The entire piece is well worth reading; here I’ll quote just one definitive statement: “I feel that a composer cannot live in his/her own world entirely. Music is a communicative and social language. It requires composers, performers and audiences. And all three need each other.”
Many if not most modern composers (just like modern writers) are also teachers, using that ongoing stability to support their musical creativity. But Walker took a different path, deciding at age 31 that she wanted to become solely a composer. She resigned her position at Oberlin Conservatory, a quite prestigious institution, and struck out on her own to build a career. She ended up living on a dairy farm in Vermont, but she apparently doesn’t run the farm itself. I’m a little unclear as to who does that, but a 1988 article says that “Composer Gwyneth Walker . . . lives on a dairy farm in Braintree, a village of Randolph, where she says she is continually motivated by the activity and energy around her. She wakes each day to the sound of cows coming into the pastureland directly below her bedroom window at 6 a.m.” (“Vermont Family Farm Is Celebrated in Song”) As of this writing in February 2022 she’s still very actively involved in the music world, with performances of her compositions scheduled all over the US, some with her planned attendance. (I do want sometime to see a performance of “Match Point,” her composition based on the game of tennis. The conductor is to be dressed in shorts and tennis shoes instead of a tux, and the timpanist plays by bouncing colored tennis balls off his drum. Sounds like so much fun!)
My own choir, the Cherry Creek Chorale* in the Denver area, has programmed Walker’s piece “Refuge,” one of nine selections that she included in a song cycle titled Sing Evermore! Here’s what the composer says about the poems she chose for this work, from the program notes provided on her website: “From early to recent, the poems have the common thread of praising music for its power, its magic, its solace and its liberation.” The text for this specific piece is by the American poet Sara Teasdale, who shows up in most high-school literature anthologies—but don’t hold that against her. Her poems are truly lovely. I have fond memories of teaching about her, and my choir has sung a setting of her poem “Stars” in Dan Forrest’s Three Nocturnes. I hadn’t done any reading about Teasdale’s life when I wrote about that piece, and I was therefore rather taken aback to find out that she died of an apparent suicide in 1933 at the age of only 49. I also hadn’t realized that she won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1917 for her collection Love Songs, in which “Refuge” appears.
Teasdale talks about the power of “singing” as a refuge for her soul, freeing her from the sad realities of depression (“my spirit’s gray defeat), poor health (“my pulse’s flagging beat”), unfulfilled desires (“my hopes that turned to sand”), and self-recrimination over her imperfection (“my own fault’s slavery”). But she isn’t really talking about “singing,” to be clear. She’s talking about writing poetry. This distinction is made quite evident in her second stanza: “A house of shining words.” One measure of good poetry is in the layers of meaning it contains, and Teasdale has at least three: escape/freedom, refuge/shelter, and lasting impact/immortality (even though this last is “fragile”). She gets these benefits from the act of creation, so the poem contains a recursive loop: I’m creating a poem telling about how creating a poem leads to all the benefits of creating a poem. And I must point out her striking imagery of blighted hopes’ being like “sand/Sifting through my close-clenched hand.” I can feel the sand trailing out of my fist as I read that line.
So I was putt-putting along, learning about Teasdale’s sad life and Walker’s happy and productive one, when I realized, ‘Hey, wait a minute. There’s an extra verse in the song that isn’t in the poem.’ So I spent quite a bit of time trying to see if there were different versions that included those lines. Nope. Now I had an explanation for why the sheet music says “Additional words by Gwyneth Walker.” I had at first assumed that this citation referred to Walker’s repeated use of “If I can sing” with the additional “and when I sing/and then I sing” to form a refrain, but she did more than that. She added a whole extra verse. (I do think she should give herself credit for this in the program notes she wrote.) So . . . I did what I always try to do if I’m writing about a living composer: I contacted her. Here’s what she said:
Since the poem was written over a century ago, and it is now in the public domain, I am free to alter the lyrics as I wish. And I do tend to make changes with many of the texts that I choose. So, you are correct that I added those words (although I doubt that many people ever notice!). My question of you, then, is why do you think that I made that addition? The answer may come more from the music itself than any poetic reason.
Well! Nothing like being handed a challenge by the author herself. Here’s the additional verse:
For in my singing I can hear
the words of healing, soft and clear,
the melding of the parts to whole,
the very language of the soul.
To me, Walker is expanding on the same recursive loop idea that I mentioned above: “In the words that I’ve created I hear the instrument of my own healing, the integration of my own self, the expression of my own deepest spirit.” Walker’s words form the middle, contrasting section of the song (the “bridge”) before she launches into the final climactic drive that uses her expanded refrain. Also, as she pointed out to me in an e-mail, “In musical terms, the inserted passage provides the one place where the harmony modulates away from the home key of E Major. Then, the return to E is made all the more glorious after the diversion.” There are clear performance directions included in the piece as a whole, by the way–if the choir pays attention they’ll know exactly what Walker wants: “triumphantly,” or “shimmering arpeggios,” or “with energy and celebration” or (my favorite) “with the mystery of singing,” along with the standard citations of tempi and dynamics. You get the idea that Walker really cares about how her music is perceived; that she has a certain flavor of emotion that she wants to get across and she’s doing all she can to explain it.
Here’s a final intriguing bit of information: Teasdale’s poem has been set to music by several other composers—I’ve been able to find four, and I’m sure there are more of them out there. But they don’t use Walker’s extra words, so they have to come up with creative ways to stretch out Teasdale’s brief text. Nothin’ wrong with that! After all, Randall Thompson wrote a six-minute piece using just the word “alleluia.” It seems to me, though, that Walker did herself a great favor by inserting a new verse that gives her a pivot point to write that contrasting section before returning to the main theme.
And with that I really must close. Except, of course, for a couple of videos. First, a performance of Walker’s piece–a good one but not the SATB version that my own choir is performing:
And just because I mentioned other settings of “Refuge,” here’s Elaine Hagenberg’s version:
*If you’re reading this post sometime before March 8-9, 2023, and you live in the Denver area, consider attending the Chorale’s spring concert at which this piece will be performed. I’m including the link here to our ticket sales page, which may or may not have this particular concert for sale as yet. Be sure to come back to the page later if you aren’t successful on your first visit!
© Debi Simons
