Modern Illuminations in Poetry and Music: Charles Wuorinen's Ashberyana

Abstract

MODERN ILLUMINATIONS IN POETRY AND MUSIC: CHARLES WUORINEN’S ASHBERYANA SARAH ROTHENBERG OURTEEN YEARS AFTER ITS CREATION, Charles Wuorinen’s Ashberyana stands as a tour-de-force of musical text-setting, bringing together, to mutual benefit, the work of two contemporaneous artists at the height of their powers. Wuorinen’s compositional agility, wit and deep understanding of English language poetry rise to the idiosyncratic challenges of John Ashbery’s poetic genius. The resultant work, composed in 2005, is a transparent and illuminating marriage of music and text in which the audacious inventiveness of each artist shines with diamond-sharp brilliance. This year, as we celebrate Charles Wuorinen’s 80th birthday, we also mourn the death of John Ashbery, who died this past September at the age of 90. Eleven years apart in age, these two men, distinct in personality, share key attributes: towering intellects, fierce artistic independence, and profound historical knowledge of their respective art forms. (As well as a taste for dry martinis.) Thoroughly committed to modernism, each possesses a rare historical sense of his own place in the larger trajectory of his respective art-form—the embodiment of F 248 Perspectives of New Music authentic artistic personality as outlined by T. S. Eliot in his seminal essay, Tradition and the Individual Talent. Eliot argues that true originality does not spontaneously appear, but is tied to an understanding of the past; even if the brilliance of innovation seems completely new, a seeming rebellion against all that is current, the sustainability of such brilliance is tied to an understanding of tradition: [Tradition] cannot be inherited, and if you want it you must obtain it by great labor. It involves, in the first place, the historical sense, which we may call nearly indispensable to anyone who would continue to be a poet beyond his twenty-fifth year; and the historical sense involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence; the historical sense compels a man to write not merely with his own generation in his bones, but with a feeling that the whole of the literature . . . has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order.1 This keen knowledge of artistic past, in both Wuorinen and Ashbery, provides the foundation for daring originality—both of these artists understand what has preceded the moment into which they are born. John Ashbery was quietly erudite, an insatiably curious reader who continually dug into the past, with a refined taste for the obscure, from such early surrealist poets as Raymond Roussel back to medieval times. He was also a great music-lover, with a large and diverse record collection , who cultivated a special penchant for forgotten composers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in addition to following his musical contemporaries. He wrote eloquently and prolifically about painting, was active as an art critic in the 1960s, and shared deep friendships with many artists of his time. Associated with a rigorous modernism, Wuorinen’s concept of the modern is one in which tradition holds with innovation. Occasional overt homages to music of the medieval, renaissance, and classical traditions have figured throughout his compositional career, as evidenced in such early works as Two Lute Songs of Thomas Campion (1956) and Salve Regina: John Bull (1966); several works inspired by the Renaissance genius Josquin Desprez—Josquin: Ave Christe (1988), Josquiniana (2002), Ave Maria . . . Virgo Serena (Josquin) (2007)— Jan’s Dowland (2014); and, recently, cadenzas for a Haydn piano concerto, which were preceded over five decades ago, in 1965, by cadenzas to a Mozart concerto. These tributes, besides being delightful musical works, serve as a gracious acknowledgement of techniques that have informed Wuorinen’s approach to composition. Modern Illuminations in Poetry and Music 249 With his deep respect for craft, Wuorinen’s roots go back to the two seminal modernists of the last century, Schoenberg and Stravinsky—as testament, their photographs sit side by side on a music stand in his study. Wuorinen absorbed the late works of Stravinsky with such depth that they become a springboard for his own distinctive style; this was recognized in his tribute of 1975, A Reliquary for Igor Stravinsky, in which Wuorinen received...