For the Union Dead

PROGRAM NOTE

“He who seeks to approach his own buried past must conduct himself like a man digging. He must not be afraid to return again and again to the same matter; to scatter it as one scatters earth, to turn it over as one turns over soil. For the matter itself is only a deposit, a stratum, which yields only to the most meticulous examination of what constitutes the real treasure hidden within the earth: the images, severed from all earlier associations, that stand --like precious fragments or torsos in a collector's gallery --in the prosaic rooms of our later understanding.” -- Walter Benjamin

The initial impulse to set Robert Lowell’s poetry came upon opening a volume of his work for the first time, in a bookshop in Los Angeles in January 2008. I was struck at once by his effortless movement between past and present, memory and experience in the here and now. A few months later, dining with my friends Rob Moose and CJ Camerieri, the instrumentation and general aesthetic properties of this work came into focus as they described to me a new ensemble that they intended to put together. The governing principle behind yMusic, as it came to be known, is that there is now a generation of musicians living and working in New York who make no hierarchical distinctions between their engagement with the spheres of classical music and so-called indie rock or other vernacular musics, and to that end, Rob and CJ assembled a peerless group of individuals notable not only for their deft movement between aesthetic worlds, but for their first-rate musicianship. In that sense, For the Union Dead, written with six specific and genre-defying players in mind, serves as an exploration of and response to the mission statement that yMusic has put forward.

The primary challenge with setting much of Lowell’s poetry lies in the idiosyncratic nature of his prosody. While there are some instances in which Lowell chooses to conform to uniform line lengths and rhyme schemes, many of his poems devise their own rules of scansion and rhythm as they go. An investigation of the internal logic of his formal devices has led me to the settings heard in this work, the joys and frustrations of setting his texts inextricably linked. Which brings us finally to the quotation from Walter Benjamin, above. These famous lines seem apt to me twice over: first, there is Lowell sifting through the soil of his memory and uncovering these beautiful scenes, and second, there is the composer sifting through the formal soil of the poetry, in order to make sense of the structures. Is it a coincidence that the three poems in the cycle which do rhyme are the only ones not preoccupied with history, with the past?

Finally, the title poem is in some sense a reflection on race, a century after the American Civil War. It seems fitting then, some forty years after the publication of For the Union Dead and with the election of the first African-American president still fresh in our memory, to throw into relief the narrative of social progress and continued challenges.

— Gabriel Kahane, 2008

LISTEN

Child's Song

The Drinker

PURCHASE