Release Date: November 13, 2020
Catalog #: RR8046
Format: Digital & Physical
21st Century
Chamber
Electroacoustic
Flute
Piano
Voice

Songs From a Spiral Tree

THE VOCAL WORKS

James Dashow composer

James Dashow’s double album SONGS FROM A SPIRAL TREE—new from Ravello Records—collects many of Dashow’s vocal works into an abundant two-disk set. The album presents his compositions for voice, with instruments and electronic sounds, setting poems by Theodore Roethke, John Ashbery, John Berryman and Gian Giacomo Menon.

Songs from a Spiral Tree is first on the program; flute (doubling piccolo and alto flute), harp, and mezzo-soprano blossom out of the silence as the track begins. Dashow deftly captures the many moods of the fleeting imagery and quicksilver language of Roethke’s poetry, while each of these five songs create a deeply personal and intimate listening experience. Perhaps for this reason critics have called this some of Dashow’s most inspired work. Following on the Roethke work we hear settings of another legendary poet, John Ashbery. Ashbery Setting, for soprano, flute, and piano, is meticulously crafted music, which provides a deeply expressive interpretation of the poem, Clepsydra, one of Ashbery’s finest efforts. The second disc features two works with stereophonic electronic sounds: in Sul Filo dei Tramonti, due Liriche dalla Mont, poems by Gian Giacomo Menon, the electronic sounds work In tandem with soprano and piano. The sounds add contrapuntal and timbral textures that further elaborate the expressivity of the text. Some Dream Songs sets the words of John Berryman whose short, complex, and above all ironic, poems inspired Dashow to enlarge considerably his compositional bounds, yielding a definitely theatrical dimension to the work. The soprano sings, talks, converses with the violinist, sings ironic comments to the pianist, and so on. This piece can easily be heard as a kind of precursor of Dashow’s planetarium opera, ARCHIMEDES. The second of the two works with electronic sounds, Second Voyage, for tenor and computer generated electronic sounds, concludes the two-disc collection. In this piece, the vocal pitches are processed using additive synthesis, ring modulation, and other methods of sonic manipulation. The result is a web of electronic sounds, varying in density and complexity according to the pacing and imagery of the text, that enhance the vocal line while immersing the words in an expressive interpretive context. The synthesized sounds, which showcase the early state of computer music as it existed in the late 1970s, are still evocative today.

SONGS FROM A SPIRAL TREE is a fascinating wide-ranging collection of poetic-musical settings. Notwithstanding the very different texts, Dashow’s unique and finely nuanced voice is heard throughout. Each work explores different dimensions of the composer’s musical conceptions in order to both complement and deepen the poetic text. These are major contributions to the vocal repertory, music that communicates a varied yet subtle palette of human emotion with rich expressive depth.

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Track Listing & Credits

# Title Composer Performer
DISC ONE
01 Songs from a Spiral Tree: No. 1 James Dashow Constance Beavon, mezzo-soprano; Lauren Weiss, flute, piccolo & alto flute; Lucia Bova, harp 7:59
02 Songs from a Spiral Tree: No. 2 James Dashow Constance Beavon, mezzo-soprano; Lauren Weiss, flute, piccolo & alto flute; Lucia Bova, harp 3:01
03 Songs from a Spiral Tree: No. 3 James Dashow Constance Beavon, mezzo-soprano; Lauren Weiss, flute, piccolo & alto flute; Lucia Bova, harp 5:41
04 Songs from a Spiral Tree: No. 4 James Dashow Constance Beavon, mezzo-soprano; Lauren Weiss, flute, piccolo & alto flute; Lucia Bova, harp 3:57
05 Songs from a Spiral Tree: No. 5 James Dashow Constance Beavon, mezzo-soprano; Lauren Weiss, flute, piccolo & alto flute; Lucia Bova, harp 6:08
06 Ashbery Setting James Dashow New York New Music Ensemble | Lisa Pierce, soprano; Jayn Rosenfeld, flute; James Winn, piano 26:26
DISC TWO
01 Sul filo dei tramonti (Version for Soprano, Piano & Electronics) James Dashow Sonia Visentin, soprano; Aldo Orvieto, piano 9:33
02 Some Dream Songs: No. 1 James Dashow Joan Logue, soprano; Mario Buffa, violin; Giancarlo Simonacci, piano 2:48
03 Some Dream Songs: No. 2 James Dashow Joan Logue, soprano; Mario Buffa, violin; Giancarlo Simonacci, piano 1:50
04 Some Dream Songs: No. 3 James Dashow Joan Logue, soprano; Mario Buffa, violin; Giancarlo Simonacci, piano 4:27
05 Some Dream Songs: No. 4 James Dashow Joan Logue, soprano; Mario Buffa, violin; Giancarlo Simonacci, piano 2:33
06 Some Dream Songs: No. 5 James Dashow Joan Logue, soprano; Mario Buffa, violin; Giancarlo Simonacci, piano 2:46
07 Some Dream Songs: No. 6 James Dashow Joan Logue, soprano; Mario Buffa, violin; Giancarlo Simonacci, piano 3:47
08 Second Voyage James Dashow George Shirley, tenor 17:53

DISC 1

SONGS FROM A SPIRAL TREE
text Theodore Roethke
© 1991 BMG-Ricordi (Roma) S.I.A.E.
Recorded January 1992 at BMG-Ariola (RCA) Studio C in Rome, Italy
Recording Engineer & Digital Editing Paolo Venditti
Commissioned by the Jubal Trio (New York)

ASHBERY SETTING
text John Ashbery
© 1991 BMG-Ricordi (Roma) S.I.A.E.
Recorded October 27-28, 1992 at BMG-Ariola (RCA) Studio C in Rome, Italy
Recording Engineer & Digital Editing Paolo Venditti

DISC 2

SUL FILO DEI TRAMONTI
due Liriche dalla Mont di Gian Giacomo Menon
text Gian Giacomo Menon
Recorded January, 2013 at Black Mirror Studios in Udine, Italy
Mixing & mastering at Delta Studios di Remanzacco in Udine, Italy
Recording Engineer, Mixing & Mastering Vittorio Vella

SOME DREAM SONGS
text John Berryman
© 1988 BMG-Ricordi (Roma) S.I.A.E.
Recorded May 2-3, 1988 at BMG-Ariola (RCA) Studio C in Rome, Italy
Recording Engineer Paolo Venditti
American Academy & Institute of Arts and Letters Composers Award Recording

SECOND VOYAGE
text John Ashbery
Recorded November 1981 in New York NY. Computer sounds realized at the Centro di Sonologia Computazionale of the Centro di Calcolo, University of Padova (Italy), using the composer’s version of Vercoe’s MUSIC360 program for digital sound synthesis.
Recording Engineer & Mixing Michael Reisman

Previously released on Computer Directions (1982), from Composer Recordings Inc. (CRI SD 456). Supported by a grant from the U.S. National Endowment for the Arts. This recording was made possible by grants from the Jerome Foundation, the Alice M. Ditson Fund of Columbia University and the generosity of Judge and Mrs. Isidore Brown.

Photos of Eastern Meadowlark on cover Amanda Guercio / Shutterstock

Executive Producer Bob Lord

Executive A&R Sam Renshaw
A&R Director Brandon MacNeil

VP, Audio Production Jeff LeRoy
Audio Director Lucas Paquette
Mastering Shaun Michaud

VP, Design & Marketing Brett Picknell
Art Director Ryan Harrison
Design Edward A. Fleming
Publicity Patrick Niland, Sara Warner

Artist Information

James Dashow

Composer

James Dashow has had commissions, awards and grants from the Bourges International Festival of Experimental Music, the Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, Linz Ars Electronica Festival, the Fromm Foundation, the Biennale di Venezia, the USA National Endowment for the Arts, RAI (Italian National Radio), the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, the Rockefeller Foundation, Il Cantiere Internazionale d’Arte (Montepulciano, Italy), the Koussevitzky Foundation, Prague Musica Nova, and the Harvard Musical Association of Boston. In 2000, he was awarded the prestigious Prix Magistere at the 30th Festival International de Musique et d’Art Sonore Electroacoustiques in Bourges.

Notes

Text by Theodore Roethke

These five exquisite songs were composed over a period of nearly three years, 1983-1986, which included a variety of interruptions, musical and non. Dashow’s sectional approach to musical development becomes ideal for setting different poems, maintaining a sense of whole across the different texts while capturing the specific expression and mood of each. These deeply expressive settings are poetic interpretations in the best sense of the word; the poems themselves seem made for exactly this instrumentation, the rich intimacy of the harp, the quicksilver mood changes of the three kinds of flute, the dark warmth of the mezzo-soprano. The overall mood is deeply personal, interior, intimate, a meditation that is at once involved in and detached from the emotions it generates. These Songs contain some of Dashow’s most inspired work. — Deborah Ruth

Text: Clepsydra, in Rivers and Mountains by John Ashbery

Dashow’s use of varying degrees of contrast matches perfectly the constantly shifting and sliding of imagery in the poem. The changes in mid-sentence of the direction of a metaphor or simile is translated into musical terms by the composer’s directional flow. The music takes advantage of concurrent temporal contrast which Dashow exploits in the form of multiple lines phasing off in different directions at different speeds, all played simultaneously with the sung text. It is a true poetic enrichment in the spirit, both expressive as well as technical, of the poem itself. In the closing moments, the fusion of poem and music, for this listener, touches the sublime. — Gianpiero Monticelli

Text by Gian Giacomo Menon

Gian Giacomo Menon has only recently been “discovered” by the Italian literary world, and they are finding in their midst the work of a major 20th century poet who shied away from the competitive scene of commercial publishing. I had the pleasure of meeting Menon in Udine in the 1990s, and he composed several poems for me, one of which is used here in this work. His is a unique and immediately recognizable rhythm and pacing, with images that blend into each other in unexpected but completely satisfying ways. If this sounds a bit like Ashbery, it is, although the two poets knew nothing of each other. The music attempts to match this flux of imagery and language with a mix of electronic sounds and piano whose linear and timbral elaborations add contrapuntal elements to the development of the work as a whole. The two moods in the poems are designed in the music to complement each other leading to a formal balance that closes with a brief, sad coda: the poet passed away during the composition of this work, and I will never know if he was aware I was setting his poetry to music. — James Dashow

Text: selections from The Dream Songs by John Berryman

Bookstore browsing which had led me to early Ashbery subsequently brought me to the first collection of Dream Songs, a rollicking set of poems that varied widely in mood, temperament and expressivity, all together painting the portrait of a complex, deeply feeling human being trying to come to grips with the realities of contemporary life. These short, often poignant, sometimes ironic, poems were very provocative to me, and I began to conceive musical ideas corresponding both to the single poems as well as to the main character overall, a certain Henry. The soprano sings, talks, mimics, converses with the pianist, croons with the violinist, the music going hand in hand with the poems’ mercurial subject, Henry, his exceptional vitality and tragic-comic ups-and-downs. The work was composed with soprano Joan Logue in mind who herself was endowed with a superbly lyric voice tempered by a decidedly ironic outlook on life. — James Dashow

Text: Voyage in the Blue by John Ashbery

Second Voyage, my second major outing with an Ashbery poem, reflects my ongoing interest in harmonizing specific pitches with the result of their own modulation spectra. The voice notes, in twos and threes were generated inside complex audio spectra by additive synthesis, FM, ring modulation, and other procedures. The pitches were the principle data input to the synthesis algorithms, such that a wide variety of inharmonic spectra could be realized with the desired pitches as frequency components of the sounds themselves. The pitch structure is elaborated both in the vocal writing as well as in the succession and combinations of the electronic sounds, a sort of parallel development scheme. This is an early application of what came to be known as my Dyad System.

Some reflections on this third release of Second Voyage: The digitally synthesized sounds employed here reflect the state of the art of computer music in the late 1970s. The composer recommends that the piece be listened to not in terms of its conservative timbral resources, but rather in terms of its expressivity, phrasing, and pacing — that is, as a composition rather than a techno-demo. After all, we still enjoy harpsichord music on the original instrument without requiring it to sound like a grand piano.

And note especially the extraordinary interpretation of George Shirley, who is probably the finest tenor of his (extended) generation. Certainly Stravinsky and Boulez thought so. I am indeed fortunate to have had such a superb musician record my music. — James Dashow

Texts

SUL FILO DEI TRAMONTI — text by Gian Giacomo Menon

Writing this program note is more difficult than usual, for two reasons. First, due to the very sad event that happened during the composition of the piece: the poet passed away before the work was done, and given his health conditions in recent times, we do not know if he could have realized that I was setting two of his poems to music. And to think that I wanted to do this ever since I met the poet, in Udine in the late 1980s. The second reason has to do with the difficulty of speaking about a poem that I was able to understand more instinctively than at the level of literal meaning. I was able to appreciate the mastery that Menon had on the subtleties of Italian especially through the sound, rhythm and flow of images of his works, and also the ability to invent new words to force the language to express what he wanted. It seems to me that what he wanted was (is) a beautiful introspective lyricism, which manages to build from the most disparate images, sounds and thought-feelings a unified poetic vision, saturated with an exquisite and intimate expression.

This is precisely what I try to capture with music, making a mixture of words and sound that transforms all this “raw material” into something new, a sort of “interpretation by transformation”, or rather, a translation into an entirely different dimension.

The title of the piece, from another Menon poem, captures, in just four words, a complexity full of feelings and multi-dimensional references. This seems to me to be the essence of Menon’s poetry, a poet for poets.

Technically, Sul Filo dei Tramonti represents yet another exploration of the resources of my Dyad System, where both the notes and the electronic sounds are derived from the same basic structure. The electronic sounds are here only stereophonic, and it was a very interesting challenge to try to create different senses of depth and space in contrast with the immobile presence of the soprano and the pianist. The structure of the music is a close variation on the structure of the poem, and is particularly evident in the second of the two selections.

The sounds were made with my MUSIC30 digital sound synthesis program and then further elaborated and transformed with a variety of audio signal processing procedures.

— James Dashow

Text

Sul Filo dei Tramonti
due liriche dalla Mont
per soprano, pianoforte e suoni elettronici
poesia di Gian Giacomo Menon

I.
da “I fermagli notturni e la carta dell’ombra”
i fermagli notturni e la carta dell’ombra
tessuti della memoria
oggi come ieri e domani l’implacabile sempre
non si cambia chi ha piantato la tenda
e il respiro dell’orsa è curvo sopra di noi
antichi segni circolano per le pareti
e si concludono in un nodo di neve
la mattina rotta nei colombi improvvisi
attenzione della pena che stringe a sinistra
prima della figura obbligata
un volto si libera dalle finestre e discende la scala
e non si esaurisce il delirio
simile all’erba intrecciata di piogge e di vento
e non ha forma né proporzione di ritorni
ed è uguale la cifra che marca e qualita il tempo
e si accetta la strada alberata di gru
un sussulto di buchi e di croste
le nebbie aggrappate l’una sull’altra
un disegno che imita il silenzio
la lancia staccata dal fianco
e non trovi la ferita nascosta
un nome da isolare e pronunciato a rovescio
il cuore autorizzato sull’arco
se i cani sbranano le indicazioni dipinte
una porta chiusa di spalle
e il fuoco inventato per vincere il freddo elementare
e raccogliersi dentro l’assurdo

II.
(n. 5253 28 ottobre 1987)

come là dove le solitudini e l’onda della terra il
fermo pietrame la terra rossa come là dove la stagione
ha il suo tempo un principio e nomi familiari

e sono più giorni ed uno è scelto nelle origini
come là dove vicino a quella terra sono cerchiati
uomini e sono di attrezzo e di porta per sentieri
e viottoli e anche i fuochi si portano con lode
come là dove è la magrezza dell’acqua e la rabbia
d’essa e l’uscire d’essa contro morte muraglie e
il tornare d’essa per l’arbusto e per l’erba levigati
ciottoli dentro le mani oh come là dov’era
dove stava dove taceva dove diceva parole oh purpuree
rotonde sottili oh anche leggere anche scosse
dal vento

Translation:

On Sunsets’ Edge, two lyrics from the Mont

I.
from “Nocturnal conjunctions and shadowed paper ”
the nocturnal conjunctions and shadowed paper
threads of memory
today as yesterday and tomorrow the relentless always
you do not change who pitched the tent
and the big dipper’s breath curves above us
ancient signs circulate around the walls
and end in a knot of snow
the morning broken in the sudden pigeons
beware the pain that tightens on the left
before the obligatory figure
a face frees itself from the windows and descends the staircase
and the delirium does not end
like grass intertwined with rain and wind
and has no form nor proportion of returns
and equals the figure that marks and qualities time
and you accept the road tree-lined with cranes
a jolt of holes and edges
the mists clinging to each other
a design that mimics silence
the spear detached from the side
and you don’t find the hidden wound
a name to be isolated and pronounced backwards
the heart authorized on the bow
if the dogs lacerate the painted signs
a door closed from behind
and the fire invented to overcome the elementary cold
and gather inside the absurd

II.
(n.5253 October 28, 1987)

as there where the loneliness and the wave of the earth the
stones immobile in the red earth as where the season
has its time a beginning and familiar names
and there are multiple days and one is chosen in the origins
as where near that land they are surrounded
the men and are tools and gateways for trails
and paths and even the fires are brought with praise
as where there is the water’s thinness and the anger
of it and going out of it against dead barriers and
the return of it to the polished saplings and grass
hand with pebbles oh as where it was
where it had been where it was silent where it spoke words oh dark red
round thin oh even light even shaken
by the wind

“I fermagli notturni e la carta dell’ombra”, da I BINARI DEL GALLO
(c) 1998 Campanotto Editore, Pasian di Prato (UD), Italia

(n. 5253 28 ottobre 1987)
manoscritto inedito dalla collezione Bombi-Dashow
(c) 1987 Gian Giacomo Menon