Visiting Poulenc and Von Bingen
And appreciating green-ness in the Pine Room
It’s July in the Pine Room! I think we’ve mustered a nice little group to enjoy an evening drink and some music. To celebrate the completion of this Satie and Les Six series, and to help us cool down a little, I’m cracking out some good white wine. I personally am switching from my usual Manhattan to a gin and tonic; you may have what you please also.
Please hang with me while we travel a bit around the music world. I think you’ll like where we come out, with our own song. Especially if you like trees. If you get impatient, skip to the recording of o noble green-ness below.
Poulenc brings Africa (?) to Paris
I’m glad we saved Poulenc ’til the last. He circles back nicely to Satie. It so happens our chosen piece is dedicated to Satie, and it is certainly quirky.
First about Poulenc the person, though. His dad was successful in business, and devoutly Catholic. His mom was musical. Francis loved music early and, as he grew older, grew in religious faith expressed in much of his work. He had an irreverent side as well; a critic called him “half monk and half naughty boy.”
While young he was greatly impressed by Stravinsky’s innovative ballet Rite of Spring. Though he was more than thirty years younger than Satie, the two were close. Poulenc loved melody, but not music theory so much.
Poulenc wrote Rapsodie Negre in 1917, when we was only eighteen. It has several parts and so is longer than Satie’s Gnossenne №1, our study back in January. It is also less subtly humorous. It’s a musical adaptation of bogusly attributed and nonsensical Liberian poetry, supposedly translated into French. This reflects then-Parisian interest in African expression, and in Dada, the irreverent movement that spanned nearly all the arts. Initial reactions to Rapsodie Negre included shock and anger, like they had been to Stravinsky’s more famous Rite of Spring in 1913. There is a funny story about the first performance. The scheduled soloist refused to perform Rapsodie Negre at the last minute, objecting to the ridiculousness of the work, so Poulenc himself was forced into the spotlight, singing nonsense in the military uniform in which he had attended. Here is the work; it’s about eleven minutes long:
Part of you might enjoy the silliness that comes in after a while (remember, the lyrics are bogus, made up, not really African). Another part might wonder whether there is cultural (or continental?) prejudice here, say in the seemingly mocking lyrics. Probably so. This is the basis of valid criticism of the work. Some of the criticism is tempered, or countered, by acknowledgment of the validity of one culture’s interest in another.
I feel a likely prejudice in Rapsodie Negre, and call that wrong. I’d guess many Europeans likely looked down upon aspects of African culture, and didn’t see any harm in ignorant interpretation of it. I’m sure we also are blind to biases we hold that will be condemned by future generations. I wonder, what might those be? What do you think?
Maybe I should have chosen another piece. But there is some value in facing up to wrong. And the piece does enable a study of the art of it, even if we put cultural mocking to the side.
The first trait I’ll pull from Rapsodie Negre, then, is the interest in the ways of another time and place. And second, bringing those ways, awkwardly, into the present day. I’m not going to run the risk of making fun of another people. In our song we’re writing for the Pine Room, I’m taking us to olden days in northern Europe, and back, all without mocking anyone but us.
Hildegard brings praise of green-ness
Hildegard von Bingen was a 13th century da Vinci. More accurately, da Vinci was a 300-years-later Hildegard. In her eighty years, often sickly, she ran a Benedictine convent, wrote theology, made medical and other scientific advances, experienced spiritual visions, and invented a language.
She also wrote music, in the then-style of solo vocals. As I have said before, I don’t want to clutter these articles with links, so I’ll just refer you to one such piece Hildegard wrote, O nobilissima viriditas (O most noble greenness), a spiritual celebration of nature. One recording I listened to was a capella. The other had organ accompaniment playing an introduction and then holding the tonic note (that may be called a drone) during a wandering soprano solo.
We bring Hildegard to a Hallmark movie
We’ll take part of her melody, begin in her technique, and then bring it jarringly into our world, in our version of o noble green-ness:
Music was less complex in Hildegard’s world than it is now. However, despite the vocal wandering (hers and ours) there is a central (tonic) note. And we come back to it recurrently with what is still common in popular music, a cadence from a fifth chord (here an A chord) to the tonic (here a D chord).
In Hildegard’s music, a single word can often last for several notes; this is called melisma. There are no chords in her piece, but to my ear they are implied and inserted as our song develops. As you can hear in our somewhat lengthy introduction (an imperfectly rendered excerpt of her work), she used a rather loose rhythm. I like to think her flow was intentionally uneven, to reflect the fluctuating emotion generated by the sequences of lyrics.
After the old-style introduction, I tighten Hildegard’s theme into verses with more recognizable rhythm, chords that I infer from her melody, and lyrics honoring her love of green-ness but adapting it to the 21st century life of many of us. Our shrinking exposure to green-ness seems both a connection and a contrast with Hildegard. I’m sure you’ll notice our song doesn’t observe the rhyming conventions of popular music. It seems more honest and confessing to talk in this way.
Well, that’s it for our seven-part series on Satie and Les Six. Let’s hang around the Pine Room and have another drink. Soon we’ll get together again over other music topics. Thanks for being here.
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Lyrics of o noble green-ness:
Glimpse of green as I drive to Target,
And on my three commuting days
I see trees along the freeway,
But these are not my trees.
We meet in the conference room at work,
I look outside, and I see trees
out the window, from the trunk up a ways,
They make me feel better so they’re kinda my trees.
If I could live in a Hallmark movie
I’d walk to work and the grocery store,
I’d walk by the park on my way back home,
And those would be my trees-o.
Saturdays I walk to the swimming beach,
Even in winter when it’s too cold to swim,
And there are trees above the shore,
And those are my trees.
In a Hallmark movie my love and I
would both be good looking,
And now they even have Blacks and Asians
And gays, and everyone pretty much gets along.
I If I could live in a Hallmark movie
I’d walk to work and the grocery store,
I’d walk by the park on my way back home,
And those would be my trees-o.
We would have a small hotel and/or a bakery,
And older people would offer us wisdom,
Although they wouldn’t be featured,
we would.
This Saturday’s walk, I’m thinking of Hildegard,
I’m not as smart as she but we have better medical care,
And at least some green is left
To make us feel better.
If I could live in a Hallmark movie
I’d walk to work and the grocery store,
I’d walk by the park on my way back home,
And those would be my trees-o.
