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"When I was 19 I
set a song - to an American poem I've now forgotten
- and I knew I'd found my own idiom. I was hooked."
By 1981, the year Miriam
Gideon made this statement, she had demonstrated that
writing for the voice was indeed a form of artistic
expression well suited to her, having composed nearly
forty vocal works. While she also composed a number of
instrumental works (for solo piano, orchestra, and
various chamber ensembles), the bulk of her oeuvre
consists of music with text and includes choral
compositions, songs for voice with piano or chamber
ensemble, a cantata, and an opera. The present disc, a
collection of seven songs spanning nearly forty years of
Gideon's compositional career, illustrates her elegant
cultivation of the vocal idiom.
Gideon was born in 1906 in Greeley, Colorado, where her
father taught philosophy and modern languages at a local
college and her mother taught elementary school. In 1916,
her family moved to Yonkers, New York, where she studied
piano and music theory and felt a "compulsion to
compose." Although Gideon's parents fostered her
musical interests, her contact with music at home was
limited, as her family did not have a phonograph or
radio. To augment her musical training, Gideon's parents
allowed her to move at the age of fifteen to Boston to
live with her uncle, Henry Gideon, who was an organist,
conductor, and the music director of Temple Israel. He
supervised her study of the piano and organ and provided
her with a rich and variegated musical environment. As a
student at Boston University, she majored in French while
taking music courses and studying piano privately with
Felix Fox. After graduating in 1926, Gideon returned to
New York and took graduate courses in music at New York
University with Marion Bauer, Charles Haubiel, and
Jacques Pillois, intending to acquire a teaching
certificate. Martin Bernstein encouraged Gideon's
compositional bent, and after a year at NYU, she
discarded her plans to teach in the public schools,
deciding instead to pursue a career as a composer.
From 1931 to 1934 Gideon continued her study of harmony,
counterpoint, and composition with Lazare Saminsky, a
Russian-born conductor and composer. Saminsky encouraged
her to continue her work in composition with Roger
Sessions. During the eight years that she studied with
Sessions, from 1935 to 1943, her music abandoned its
tonal underpinnings for a more independent, free atonal
style. While completing her formal training in
composition with Sessions, Gideon entered Columbia
University's graduate musicology program in 1942, earning
an M.A. in 1946. She began teaching at Brooklyn College,
City University of New York in 1944; during the next five
decades, Gideon would also teach at City College, the
Manhattan School of Music, and the Jewish Theological
Seminary of America, where she elected to the American
Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, and a
retrospective concert of her music took place at the
Academy in 1992.
The Sonnets from Shakespeare (1951) were premiered at a
concert of the International Society for Contemporary
Music in New York in 1951. George Perle wrote to Gideon
that "I feel that you’ve hit something with
your Shakespeare Songs that seldom happens more than once
in a lifetime to a composer." Perle championed the
Sonnets from Shakespeare, enthusiastically describing
them in 1960 to William Glock, the Controller of Music
for the British Broadcasting Corporation, as "the
best American work of the last fifty years." Perle's
advocacy resulted in a BBC broadcast performance of the
Sonnets in 1961.
Rhymes from the Hill (1968) demonstrates Gideon's mastery
in deploying instruments to intensify a poem's drama. Her
sensitivity to the sonorous qualities of the clarinet,
cello, and marimba wonderfully underscores the ironic
humor in Christian Morgenstern's poems.
Gideon identified The Hound of Heaven (1945) as
"probably the first piece written in what I would
call my own style." Its text is based on Francis
Thompson's poem of the same name, which describes the
narrator’s conversion to Catholicism and the
necessity of allowing God, the heavenly hound, to capture
his soul so he can attain happiness. In discussing her
decision to set a portion of this text to celebrate the
centenary of Temple Emanu-El in New York, which had
commissioned it, Gideon eloquently argued for the poem's
relevance to Jewish suffering.
Gideon composed Nocturnes (1975) at the request of
"a parent who preferred to commission a composer
than to spend money on parties for his children's
important birthdays." Her setting of poems by Percy
Bysshe Shelly, Jean Starr Untermeyer, and Frank Dempster
Sherman demonstrates her remarkable ability to gather
together stylistically disparate texts that evoke a
common theme - here, the mysterious and mystical
qualities of night.
The Resounding Lyre (1979) sets three German poems from
the thirteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries and
is based upon an earlier work, her Spiritual Madrigals
(1965) for chorus and chamber ensemble. To the original
instrumentation of viola, cello, and bassoon, Gideon
added flute, oboe, trumpet, and violin - the resultant
version displays some of Gideon's finest writing for solo
voice and chamber ensemble. It also stands as a rare
musical collaboration between Gideon and her husband
Frederic Ewen, who wrote the first poem,
"Mutterbildnis."
Spirit Above the Dust (1981) was premiered at Yale
University in 1981, and was later performed at the
Library of Congress and Carnegie Hall. Gideon's selection
and setting of the first text , by Anne Bradstreet, is
suggestive in relation to a statement she made in 1970,
that "I strongly believe a woman composer can have
something special to say, in that there is a very
particular woman's way of responding to the world - and
this in some basic way is quite different and yet no less
important than a man's."
Wing'd Hour (1983) was written during a particularly
fruitful decade for Gideon. Its music and texts (by Dante
Gabriel Rossetti, Christina Rossetti, and Walter de la
Mare) movingly meditate upon life, loss, and death.
- Ellie M. Hisama
Notes by the composer from the LP releases:
Sonnets from Shakespeare contains three sonnets concerned
with the idea of Time: 'Devouring Time,' 'No longer mourn
for me,' and 'No, Time, thou shalt not boast.' These
stormy verses alternate with the serene 'Music to hear'
and 'Full many a glorious morning.' The cycle opens with
voice alone, soon joined by the strings. Instrumental
ritornelles are used as separations between the songs,
and as a recall of moods and thematic ideas. The strings
maintain a strong profile throughout, while the trumpet
threads its way, and comments, almost like a second human
voice.
Rhymes from the Hill is a song cycle, composed in 1968,
comprising five poems from the "Galgenlieder"
(Gallows Songs) by Christian Morgenstern, set in the
original German for solo voice, clarinet, cello and
marimba. On the first appearance of these poems in
Germany in 1905 a critic spoke of the 'magnificent subtle
humor of the heart behind these crazy verse fancies.'
From this sardonic collection I have chosen five poems:
1 "Song of the Gallows Gang": Nocturnal shrieks
and sinister sounds of nature are heard
in the clattering of the marimba and the wail of the
clarinet.
2 "Gallows Child's Lullaby": A biting parody of
the nursery rhyme "Sleep, baby, sleep",
in which the rocking of the marimba, the sinister purring
of the clarinet, and the lulling of the cello suggest a
less than benign path to slumber.
3 & 4 "Two clocks": the first moving
backward or forward, the second adjusting its pace as
desired - a clockwork with a heart. Brittle sounds from
the marimba provide a mechanical, ticking background for
the espressivo phrases of cello and clarinet.
5 "The Sigh": - a tribute to Love. Skating on
the ice, the sigh becomes so overheated by amorous
thoughts that the ice melts and he disappears. Tremolos
on the marimba, grace notes on the clarinet, and
glissandi on the cello are used to depict this ironic
tragedy.
The Hound of Heaven, composed in 1945, is a setting for
solo voice and chamber group, a combination which I have
used many times subsequently. This work, for voice, oboe
and string trio utilizes several lines from the poem of
that title by Francis Thompson, expressing profound life
experiences, which mar, in order to make, the human
being: 'Ah! must Thou char the wood ere Thou canst limn
with it?' Of this work George Perle has written: 'The
texture...is strikingly personal, characterized by
lightness, the sudden exposure of individual notes,
constantly shifting octave relationships...This is a
technique that may be indefinitely expanded and within
which a composer may grow.'
Nocturnes was composed in 1975 on a commission from Mr.
and Mrs. Sidney Siegel of New York City, in celebration
of the 18th birthday of their daughter, Rena. The poems I
chose, and their transmutation into music, seemed an
appropriate evocation of youth and its awakening to the
magical forces of nature: the quiet traversing of the sky
in "To The Moon"; a serene control over
turbulent forces in "High Tide"; and the
dream-like spell of "Witchery."
The Resounding Lyre - a metaphor for the human heart -
consists of three settings of German poems ranging from
the 13th century to the present. The first,
"Mutterbildnis", by Frederic Ewen, is the
portrait of a mother, a symbol of compassion for all
humanity. The second, "W”hebšf und
Nichtenvint", in Middle High German, is the
complaint of a 13th century Jewish minnesinger who vows
to leave his patrons because they lack respect for his
art and withhold his proper reward; he will join his
persecuted people. The third poem, by Heinrich Heine,
"Hallelujah", is a celebration of glory and
wonder at the masterpiece of creation - the human heart.
Spirit Above the Dust, commissioned by the Elizabeth
Sprague Coolidge Foundation of the Library of Congress to
honor the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the
Music Library Association, is a setting for voice and
eight instruments of verses by three American poets: Anne
Bradstreet, Archibald MacLeish and Norman Rosten.
The poems chosen represent a variety of interpretations
of American life. Anne Bradstreet (1612–1672) was
the first American woman poet to be published. Her
"Prologue" states with elegant irony her creed
of woman's independence. Archibald MacLeish served as
Librarian of Congress from 1939 to 1944; "The Two
Trees", "The Linden Branch" and "The
Snow Fall" - the poems used in this cycle - reveal
his humanistic attitude. Norman Rosten's "Black
Boy" is a searing indictment of a lynching, while
Caliban exhibits a sardonic wit, one of the poet's
characteristics traits.
Wing'd Hour was composed in 1983 in memory of a dear
friend, who, with his wife, read and loved poetry. The
poems chosen were among their favorites, and constitute a
kind of cycle: the awakening of love, love's fulfillment,
and death and loss. In 'Silent Noon,' after palpitating
figures in winds and strings, the vibraphone announces
the tentative start of the drama which is to follow,
becoming more outspoken and joyous in'‘My heart is
like a singing bird.' All instruments are whittled down
and laconic in the brief but ominous 'Interlude,' and
become poignant with loneliness in 'Autumn.'
- Miriam Gideon
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