(News about Walter Saul appears at the bottom)
When one considers the enormous repertoire for solo voice and piano, there is a curious paucity of works as soon as one adds an obbligato instrument such as clarinet or flute. Franz Schubert’s The Shepherd on the Rock, scored for soprano, clarinet, and piano, leaps out to me as one of those works, and, if one searches the IMSLP website for voice, clarinet, and piano, only nine listings appear, including the Schubert. For voice, flute, and piano, only 29 listings appear. In both cases, several of the listed works are by living composers. What have we been largely missing until more recent times with this dearth of vocal/instrumental/piano trios? If Dennis Dougherty’s Birds in a Mulberry Tree is any indication, we have been missing a lot of sonic and musical beauty.
There is also a vocal/instrumental divide in classical music that seems a shame to perpetuate, and, especially when musicians of the caliber of Rebekah AuYeung, soprano, and Dr. Marie Kenote, flutist, collaborate so effectively with Christopher Oldfather at the piano. In fact, Birds in a Mulberry Tree reminds me some of Schubert’s masterpiece. Both works focus on scenes from nature. Both works change keys deftly and elegantly. And both works flow out of the Romantic tradition as it celebrates nature, love, and art.
Both works also celebrate the half step in structural ways as well. In The Shepherd on the Rock’s slow, wistful section in G minor, Schubert underscores the narrator’s lament of loneliness by leaning on the Neapolitan 6th chord of A-flat Major, a half step above the keynote, and then modulating to that key, before a return to G minor. Then, as though that weren’t sufficiently bleak, Schubert darkens the mood even more by going to A-flat minor. Dougherty celebrates the half step a bit differently by what he calls a “symmetrically Augmented Diatonic Scale (Double Augmented) which enhances both the bottom half of the major scale with a raised fourth and the upper half with a raised octave.” In his chosen key of E major, think of the Lydian mode with the raised 4th step and then also raise the 8th step a half step to E#. This seems simple enough, but the presence of many augmented octaves (never unisons) lends a hallmark to Dougherty’s well-chosen harmonies and gives them an expressive richness that would be sorely missed were the augmented octave not there. This is not simply the case of Stravinsky’s “wrong notes” that intellectually prove to be correct; this is a simple artifice that genuinely expresses the longing of the narrator in a heartfelt way.
But in his program notes Dougherty sells his harmonies short. The song moves freely up and down a minor third to Db major and G major, recalling the stunning modulations of Schubert as well and enriching our harmonic experience, paralleling the richness of colors of the birds in the tree and the unpredictability of nature. When I consider how often composers especially in this century get stuck in one or two diatonic modes, this is a most refreshing contrast.
Like the intimate dialogue between voice and clarinet in Schubert’s music, Dougherty uses the voice and flute in very complementary ways. The flute is well-suited to the many bird calls it plays in counterpoint with the voice’s reflections and discovery of the yellow finch.
I worry only that the marvelous harmonic invention of this work might overwhelm the melodies, which struggle a little for me to be memorable. Much of the soprano’s range is spent in its five notes in the middle. In this respect, Dougherty’s music resembles Richard Wagner’s operas, where so many of the significant themes, especially the leitmotivs, are entrusted to the orchestra rather than the voice. The flute, especially, fills that role here. However, there is a priceless moment where the narrator pleads to see a yellow bird and the melody beautifully explodes just as a dramatic shift to a new key takes place.
The song ends quietly as first the soprano, then the flute withdraw, leaving the piano with the last soliloquy. An art song indeed! Like the Schubert, probably worthy of one or two other movements.
News from Walter Saul:
- Only nine days until the release of the new CD, Kiev 2014! We will have it on this website by October 13, the “street date” set by Naxos for release.
- The world première of Kiev 2014 takes place October 17 and 18, 2015, by the Fresno Philharmonic under the direction of Maestro Theodore Kuchar. Please visit http://www.fresnophil.org/ for more details and to order your tickets.