The Art Songs of Louise Talma

Kendra Preston Leonard

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351782166
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

The Art Songs of Louise Talma presents some of Talma's finest compositions and those most frequently performed during her life. It includes pieces appropriate for beginning, intermediate, and advanced singers and collaborative pianists. The songs include text settings of American, English, and French poets and writers, including Native American poems, works by W. H. Auden, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Emily Dickinson, e. e. cummings, John Donne, Gerald Manley Hopkins, William Shakespeare, and Wallace Stevens, as well as poems from medieval France and religious texts. Because of the popularity of Talma's choral works and the fact that her works for voice and piano were performed often, this sourcebook will be useful to singers at all stages of their careers, as well as scholars of twentieth-century music as a whole. The diversity of compositional approaches Talma used provides a snapshot of American trends in composition during the twentieth century; during the course of her career, Talma moved from neo-classicism to serialism and finally to non-strict serial-derived atonality in her works. Inclusion of performance and reception histories of the songs helps trace changing public taste in American art song and the repertoire of performers, particularly those interested in contemporary music.

CHAPTER 1 READING TALMA’S SONGS

Louise Talma (ca. 1906–1996), the American composer born of Danish and French heritage is, perhaps, best known today for her choral works, notably her setting of e. e. cummings’s Let’s Touch the Sky (1952), her oratorio The Divine Flame (1948), and her treatment of John Donne’s Holy Sonnets in La Corona (1955).¹ During her career Talma was, however, equally recognized as a composer of art songs for solo voice and piano, with nearly thirty works usually for soprano or tenor. Because she often disseminated her compositions personally as handwritten manuscript copies or did not publish them at all, very few of her art songs exist in the form of commercially engraved scores. In addition, she created conflicting versions of some of her songs and did little to publicize those that were released in print. In this study, I seek to establish Talma’s songs for solo voice and piano as important and fascinating works of art created over the course of the composer’s career, often depicting her life through choice of texts and their musical settings.

A Brief Overview of Talma’s Life

Talma, whose mother was a singer, had already launched a career as a concert pianist when she began composing in the early 1920s. She soon embarked on composition lessons with Harold Brockway (1870–1951) and Percy Goetschius (1853–1943) at the Institute of Musical Art—later to become the Juilliard School—before studying with Nadia Boulanger (1897–1979) at the Conservatoire Américain in Fontainebleau, France, in 1927. From her earliest works Talma indicated that her aesthetic interests lay with the French neoclassical school. Her first songs illustrate her early embrace of common neoclassical tropes: an emphasis on counterpoint and rhythm, extended or otherwise non-traditional harmony, and the presence of the grande ligne. Aaron Copland (1900–1990), who had also studied with Boulanger in the 1920s, defined this last element as “the sense of forward motion, of flow and continuity in the musical discourse; the feeling for inevitability, for the creating of an entire piece that could be thought of as a functioning entity.”² This ideal was particularly stressed as an essential part of a successful composition by Boulanger but also by other French composers.

Under her teacher’s guidance, Talma converted from agnosticism to Roman Catholicism in 1934 with Boulanger as her godmother and adopted an outwardly ascetic lifestyle similar to Boulanger’s in its devotion to music. She did not give up worldly ways, however: she was well-known for her enjoyment of good food (particularly chocolate), pulp detective novels, French fashion, smoking, and shooting pool. While many of her early works express grief and melancholy, possibly for a sister who died at a young age,³ and the compositions of her late twenties and early thirties are outpourings of desire for an unattainable beloved—likely Boulanger herself⁴—she composed more than twenty religious works after her conversion, setting a number of sacred texts and spiritual writings.

Illustration 1.1
Nadia Boulanger and Louise Talma (ca. 1930s)

Reproduced through the courtesy of the Digital Department of the Library of Congress, Duplication Services Division, and with the permission of The MacDowell Colony

Talma became a full-time member of the music faculty at Hunter College in New York City in 1928 and taught harmony there until 1979. With two of her students, Louis Martin and James Harrison, she helped author two harmony textbooks.⁵ Her Piano Sonata No. 1 (1943), Toccata for Orchestra (1944), and Alleluia in the Form of Toccata for piano (1945) were highly praised by critics and helped establish Talma as an important American composer. Based in part on the success of these works, she became the second woman (after Ruth Crawford Seeger in 1930) to receive a Guggenheim Fellowship in music composition and the first woman awarded back-to-back Guggenheims, in 1946 and 1947. After teaching harmony at the Conservatoire Américain for several years—the first American to do so—she began spending most of her summers at two artists’ colonies: the MacDowell Colony in Peterborough, New Hampshire, and later Yaddo in Saratoga Springs, New York. Because of her teaching obligations during the academic year, most of her mature works were composed while she resided at one of these or other artists’ colonies.

In 1952, Talma heard Irving Fine’s serial but tonally centered string quartet. Confessing that it was the first serial work that made sense to her musically, she immediately started working with serial approaches and techniques in her works.⁶ Although, when she announced that she had moved into “non-serial atonality,” she claimed that her “serial period” extended from 1952 until 1967,⁷ the majority of her works until her death engaged in some form of serial practice. Her first completed serial piece was a setting of e. e. cummings’s Let’s Touch the Sky (1952); her String Quartet (1954), Six Etudes for Piano (1954), Piano Sonata No. 2 (1955), and La Corona (1955), a treatment of Donne’s Holy Sonnets, all clearly communicate audible serial elements. As she developed her own compositional voice with serial procedures, Talma created rows that allowed for tonal centering as well as for a more traditional, stricter manipulation of pitch class sets.

Talma began working on a grand opera with writer Thornton Wilder (1897–1975) in 1954 after the two met at the MacDowell Colony. They considered several scenarios before deciding to base their collaboration on Wilder’s existing stage play about the Greek figure Alcestis. Talma composed the bulk of the opera during visits to the American Academy in Rome and to the MacDowell Colony. The Alcestiad was completed in 1958. Although several American opera houses, notably the Lyric Opera in Chicago, the Metropolitan in New York City, and the San Francisco Opera, expressed interest in the work, all of them ultimately deemed it too difficult for American performers and audiences. Primarily because Wilder had enjoyed considerable success in Germany with his stage plays, The Alcestiad was given its premiere at the opera house in Frankfurt-am-Main in 1962. It was the first time that an opera by an American woman had been performed in Europe. Perhaps due to the enormous resources the work requires and despite the fact that it was critically and publicly well-received, it has not been mounted in the United States and remains relatively unknown. The Alcestiad, nonetheless, secured its composer a place in the ranks of groundbreaking American and female composers: in 1963, she was the first female composer to win the Sibelius Medal for composition, and in 1974 she became the first woman composer elected to the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters.

During the 1960s, Talma’s work took a political bent. She dedicated her Dialogues for piano and orchestra (1964) to President John F. Kennedy after his assassination and composed A Time to Remember (1967), an oratorio presenting Kennedy’s own words. The Tolling Bell, a setting of texts by Shakespeare, Marlowe, and Donne for baritone and orchestra, was completed in 1969 and was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in music. Talma wrote her own libretto for her 1976 chamber opera, Have You Heard? Do You Know?, a work about the Cold War, the desire for utopias, and covert same-sex desire. She continued to compose prolifically into her eighties. She died while working on an elegiac piece, The Lengthening Shadows, at the Yaddo colony in August of 1996.

Talma kept her personal life relatively quiet. Copious correspondence reveals, however, several passionate affairs with women, including one in late life with Ethelston (Eth) Chapman (1920–1998), a fellow student at Fontainebleau whose professional life was similar to Talma’s and who taught harmony for the majority of her career. Talma left no surviving relatives and after her death, because she believed that composition could not be taught, had no composition students to champion her works or her pedagogical methods in harmony and theory. In recent years, however, performers have become interested in Talma’s works, which are once again gaining a foothold in the vocal and piano repertoires.

Talma’s Compositional Language

As I have written elsewhere, Talma’s works display two attributes that are especially crucial in understanding her approaches to composition.⁸ The first of these is what I call “dis/continuity.” She often cited the influence of Stravinsky’s music on her own, which explains, in part, the prominence of block forms, quasitonal writing, and dis/continuity in her creations. Stravinsky’s influence on Talma can be attributed equally to her studies of his music with Boulanger and to her own interest in his work and study of his pieces throughout her career. The latter phenomenon that I term “dis/continuity” is described in the context of Stravinsky’s works by Joseph Straus as having

strong centripetal forces, with each of the formal units asserting its own independence and integrity. But the centrifugal forces are equally strong, holding the sections together. The result in Stravinsky’s music is not the gentle harmonious reconciliation of opposing tendencies, but rather a furious tension, at all levels, between the forces of integration and disintegration.⁹

In Talma’s works, dis/continuity can often be traced through specific compositional elements, such as tonality or pitch center, rhythm, texture, and motifs. For example, she might begin a work in an established pitch center with a three-voice texture and Motif A; in the next section Motif A continues while the pitch center changes (either to a related area, such as from A to C, or radically, for example, from A to D-sharp; Talma did both), and the texture is altered to two voices; in the third section, the pitch center from section 1 might return while the texture of two voices remains, providing continuity, and she introduced Motif B as a dis/continuous gesture.

The construction of block forms also provides opportunities for dis/continuity. By avoiding transitions Talma could immediately shift from one set of elements to another, keeping or dropping ingredients as she chose. This is particularly common in her songs, which often exhibit a basic ternary form (ABA ¹). In using this form, Talma was able to employ fundamentally different textures, vocal approaches, pitch centers, and other compositional components; often at least one feature will carry over between sections, but this is not always the case. Other forms that lent themselves well to dis/continuous practices, such as variations, were also preferred by Talma. Her sets of variations are works in which the practice of dis/continuity is most obvious. Both block forms and variations allowed her to create contrast and a sense of linear motion through the opposing forces of static and changing materials instead of traditional harmonic development, which she generally eschewed. As Gretchen Horlacher commented on Stravinsky’s similar approach, “development is a product of the changing vertical coincidences created by the strata”;¹⁰ as a result, Talma often created and maintained interest through dis/continuities between strata and sections. While her patterns do not necessarily result in the shifting pitch centers of her work, as Stravinsky’s do, it is, nonetheless, apparent that his use of block forms, cyclic ostinati, and interval cycles all influenced Talma’s treatment of the same tools.

As part of her concern for dis/continuity, Talma conceived unique methods ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Foreword: From the Series Editor
• Preface: From the Author
• 1 Reading Talma's Songs
• 2 Songs of Mourning and Love
• 3 Farewell to Youth
• 4 A Haunted Psyche
• 5 Metaphors in Music
• Bibliography: Cited Sources and Suggested Readings
• Note Concerning the Appendices
• Appendix 1: Sources on the Vocal Works of Louise Talma
• Appendix 2: The Compositions for Voice by Louise Talma
• Appendix 3: Recordings of Talma’s Vocal Works
• Index 1: Individuals, Places, and Ideas
• Index 2: Titles of Musical Compositions