A week ago today
we officially launched the crowd source
fund-raising campaign for the Elizabeth Bishop Legacy Recording. We are
nearing
the $5,000 mark!!! We want to thank everyone who has contributed so far.
Your
interest in and support for this exciting project is greatly
appreciated! Momenutum is building. Help keep the ball rolling. We still
need your contributions and your help spreading the word!!!
Keep
watch on this blog and on the EB Legacy Recording blog (
http://eb100legacyrecording.blogspot.ca/) for updates and more information. Next week, we will put up our
HONOUR ROLL
with the names of contributors. We will also be posting new videos and other
background information about the campaign, the composers and the pieces being
recorded, during the next several weeks.
Below is a lovely commentary about Bishop’s poem “Sunday 4 A.M.,” by
composer John Plant, whose setting of these intriguing words is one of the pieces recorded for the
cd. “Sunday 4 A.M.” was published in The
New Yorker on 20 September 1958. The text of the poem is readily available
online with just a search of the title. Stay tuned for updates and interesting
features.
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NOTES
on SUNDAY, 4 A.M.
I’ve
tried to create the sense of a flooded, floating dreamworld at the beginning.
There’s a profusion
of religious imagery in this poem, but this imagery is all jumbled up with
secular hardware, and sometimes rusty hardware at that. I evoked the “cross-
and wheel-studded” with swooping lines punctuated by irregular jagged
pizzicatos. The “ancillary / Mary” suggests the Virgin Mary, both because of
the color blue and the word “ancillary” (in the Latin text of the Annunciation
Mary identifies herself as “ancilla Domini”, the handmaiden of the Lord) — but
it also might be an old acquaintance, tall Mary Sterns. The steady upward
movement suggests not only her tallness, but the vaporous evanescence of her
appearance and indeed of her identity. Nails suggest the cross, but the nails
are rusty, in a homely kitchen knifebox. The agitated music here is meant to
suggest rusty nails rattling around in a box. A “vox humana” is a stop on a
church organ — or a parlour organ; but the voice is rather that of a
discontented ghost.
The gray horse needs shoeing!
It’s always the same!
What are you doing,
there, beyond the frame?
If you’re the donor,
you might do that much!
The
donor might be God, the putative giver of life, or a patron who donates an altar
(altered) cloth to the church. I've turned these lines into a sort of baroque
da capo (ABA)
aria, but one which fragments at the repeat.
Turn on the light. Turn over.
On the bed a smutch
The
dreamer briefly awakens, but only to fall into another dream; the constant is
the jumbling of religious and secular imagery. The smutch on the bed becomes a
Renaissance painting on an altar (altered) cloth — Gesso is what you put on a
cloth or canvas in order to be able to paint on it; and the gold suggests the gold
leaf of a Renaissance religious painting. Given Bishop’s own Presbyterian
upbringing, I’ve crosspatched a sort of distorted Protestant hymn with Gregorian
chant here.
The
cat, a predator, emerges from the other dream, or perhaps it’s a real cat which transmogrifies
into a dream cat; musically, I've shown the cat pursued by its ghost shadow (bowed/pizzicato
passages in canon). I hope the moment that cat jumps to the window, moth in
mouth, is clear — the pizzicato is intercepted by a single loud sustained note.
Toward
the end, the brook is flooding the dream — to the point that it reaches the
stairs, even reaches the dreamers' foot dangling from the bed — until a bird,
heard from outside, in the real world, puts everything right by arranging two
notes at right angles — (the sacred and the profane? the dream note and the
note heard in the real world?) by reorganizing the dreamer’s perspective as she
awakens. This poem is adjacent to “Sandpiper” in Bishop's collection Questions of Travel, and I am certain that
the proximity of the two birds is deliberate. — John Plant
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