The Fiction Issue

PROGRAM NOTE

As a songwriter, I’ve always been preoccupied with exploring the limits of narrative economy in the context of a three or four minute song. My favorite lyricists, like my favorite short story writers, have a way of distilling a tale into carefully selected details, images, or resonances which may not on the surface provide a linear story, but when taken together, form a richly coherent through-line.

This summer, while I was upstate at Yaddo ostensibly to write this piece, I couldn’t seem to squeeze out a note of music. I had been sharing breakfasts with the poets Stephen Dunn and Jonathan Aaron, and perhaps inspired by their company, found myself daily writing longhand prose poems which, after I’d returned to Brooklyn, revealed themselves to be sketches for the text of The Fiction Issue.

Musically and narratively speaking, The Fiction Issue is a continuation of some ideas that I began exploring in my orchestral song cycle Crane Palimpsest, which offered, through settings of Hart Crane’s “Proem: To Brooklyn Bridge” and my own responses to it, twin reflections on the ecstatic geography of New York. Like that work, The Fiction Issue is preoccupied with reconciling disparate musical languages: one that is immediate, earthy, grounded in functional harmony, adjacent to pop song if not concurrent with it; and another that is in the tradition of contemporary concert music: harmonically ambiguous or fluid, concerned with the exploration of color and timbre, and so on.

But where Crane found me singing both parts of the binary, in The Fiction Issue, I have had the great privilege of sharing vocal duties with and writing for Shara Worden, one of the finest and most emotionally immediate singers working today. This brings me back to my opening gambit about narrative economy. I’d initially conjectured that whereas a three minute song was rather like a short story, a twenty- some-odd minute work for two voices and ensemble would allow me to explore novelistic horizons. But what I’ve ended up writing seems more to me like twin characters studies: modest in scope, but I hope emotionally detailed.

— Gabriel Kahane, September 2012

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