The Sun-Sounding Scythian

The chapter examines the relationships between Prokofiev’s early music and the poets that inspired him. Guided by Konstantin Balmont’s poetic characterization of him in the early 1920s as a “sun-sounding Scythian,” it looks at two specific facets of Russian Symbolism and post-Symbolism that informed Prokofiev’s works: the sun cult and Scythianism. Prokofiev’s luminous Scythianism encompasses the paradox of the lyricism of his early songs and the perceived barbarism of his rejected ballet Ala and Lolli, from which the composer derived his Scythian Suite. By analyzing Prokofiev’s collaboration with Gorodetskii on Ala and Lolli and the composer’s settings of Balmont’s and Akhmatova’s poems, we can understand how the incarnations of the sun god in the Russian Silver Age informed both the sunrise music and the aesthetics of horror in the ballet and the suite. The chapter also reflects on Ala and Lolli as an unrealized ballet in the shadow of Igor Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring.

Voice Leading and Text-Music Relations in David Bowie’s Early Songs

In this paper, I explore how voice-leading analysis can illuminate text-music relations at both structural and foreground levels in three songs by David Bowie: “Life on Mars,” “Five Years,” and “We Are the Dead.” The analyses provide a way of relating seemingly disparate stylistic examples through text-music relations applicable to a wide variety of rock music.

Slanted beats, enchanted communities: Pavement's early phrase rhythm as indie narrative

Previous studies of indie music from the 1980s and 1990s have noted that it uses a number of stylistic markers – involving production values, singing style instrumentation and lyrical themes – to convey difference from a perceived mainstream. However, the ideal of difference also influences other aspects of songwriting. As a case study, this article examines early songs by the highly regarded indie band Pavement in which irregularity in phrasing and hypermeter supports a narrative of differentiation. Recurring strategies for creating irregularity include thwarting expected closure at the ends of phrases, using the sounds of words to project conflicting cues for grouping boundaries and creating highly irregular hypermetric lengths. These metric and phrasing devices, when heard in the context of songs, often have vivid narrative or expressive implications.

On Singing and Listening in Vaughan Williams's Early Songs

Vaughan Williams's celebrated set of Robert Louis Stevenson settings, Songs of Travel, has lately garnered liberal scholarly attention, not least on account of the vicissitudes of its publication history. Following the cycle's premiere in 1904 it was issued in two separate books, each gathering stylistically different songs. Though a credible case for narrative coherence has been advanced in numerous accounts, the cycle's peculiar amalgamation of materials might rather be read as a signal to its projection of multiple voices, which unsettle the longstanding critical tendency to map a single protagonist through its progress. The division marked by the cycle's publication history may productively be understood to reflect a tension inherent in its aesthetic propositions, one constitutive of much of Vaughan Williams's work, which frequently mediates between the individualistic and the collective, the “artistic” and the “accessible,” and, as I suggest, the subjective voice of the individual artist in its invitation to the participation of a singing and listening community. I propose that Vaughan Williams's early songs frequently frame the idea or demand the engagement of a listener's contribution, as particular modes of singing and listening—and singing-as-listening—are figured and invited within the music's constitution. Composed as he was searching for an individual creative voice that simultaneously sustained a nascent commitment to the social utility and intelligibility of national art music, these songs explore the possibility of achieving a self-consciously collective authorial subjectivity, often reaching toward a musical intersubjectivity wherein boundaries between self and other—and between composer, performer, and listener—are collapsed. In the recognition of such processes lies a means of examining the tendency of Vaughan Williams's work toward projecting a powerfully subjective voice that simultaneously claims identification with no single agency.

Present Absence: Debussy, Song, and the Art of (Dis)appearing

Debussy's early song settings of Théodore de Banville and Paul Bourget foreground the Romantic topic by which the singing voice revokes lost presence. The closed aesthetic space of music becomes, in these songs, the space of the nocturnal garden in which the souls of lovers merge with the containing landscape. But Debussy's fascination with the poetry of Paul Verlaine, over a period of twenty-two years from 1882 to 1904, juxtaposes such evocations of intense sensuous presence with songs of alienated absence and ironic distance. The poems Debussy set from Verlaine's Fêtes galantes (1869) provoke both kinds of song, the latter embodied through the shadowy figures of the commedia dell'arte. In the case of two such poems, “En sourdine” and “Clair de lune,” Debussy produced two different settings of the same text, ten years apart. The usual account is that these show the composer's progression from Romantic lyricism to a more sophisticated but withdrawn style, a development paralleled by a biographical story moving from his youthful passion for the dedicatee of the early songs, Marie-Blanche Vasnier, to the breakdown of his first marriage in 1904. But neither the stylistic nor the biographical narrative provides an adequate account of the Verlaine songs, and both miss their exploration of the economy of desire at the heart of the piano song.

Inventing la Môme

The chapter begins with a brief biography of Piaf’s early years as a singer but focuses primarily on how the Piaf myth—the imagined Piaf that France and the world would come to know--was invented. The process of invention was the work initially of Piaf herself, who fabricated a life story almost from the beginning. But she was soon joined in this task by her first impresario, Raymond Asso, who wrote the lyrics for many of her early songs, and Marguerite Monnot, who composed the music. This team, progressively joined by others, worked together to produce a new iteration of the well-known realist song genre: Piaf’s songs were read through the narratives of the singer’s life, but, at the same time, those narratives were themselves read through the songs. This reciprocal identification between song and life would form the core meaning of Piaf’s stardom.