How has your week been, salon friends? The weather has been gorgeous here in Paris, making it difficult to focus on work, though I did find a surprisingly successful compromise writing and reading in the Jardin du Luxembourg.
This week I’d like to discuss an art song I’m working on: “Heart, we will forget him” (1950), the fifth song in Aaron Copland’s Twelve Poems of Emily Dickinson cycle.
Let’s begin with the Dickinson poem:
Heart, we will forget him
You and I, tonight.
You may forget the warmth he gave,
I will forget the light.
When you have done, pray tell me,
That I my thoughts may dim;
Haste! lest while you're lagging,
I may remember him!
At first read, the poem is simple: the speaker addresses her heart and says they will forget her lover together. There is a gentle music in its rhyme scheme and a delicate imagery of temperature and light.
Upon closer examination, we realize that every utterance the speaker makes is in the future tense, the imperative, or the hypothetical, a painfully obvious indication that she has not forgotten her lover—and never will. Her use of the modal verbs will and may expresses not only ambiguous meaning, but demonstrates a desperation to quite literally modulate her situation, to pass from the present to the future.
The speaker implores the heart as though it were a kind of consciousness that could “forget.” But we can’t instruct our hearts. Our hearts—thoughtless, ruled by something other than logic—instruct us. In the poem, we witness the desire to reverse this endlessly frustrating facet of the human condition.
The genius of Emily Dickinson lies in capturing all this depth in simplicity: a quality I believe to be at the heart of all great American art.
I’ve never sung a Copland piece before. While searching for English-language repertoire, it dawned on me that many years ago I had picked up a book of his at a brocante here in Paris: What to Listen for in Music. Here is a quote from it to enlighten our discussion:
[. . . ] music does have an expressive meaning but . . . we cannot say in so many words what that meaning is.
According to Copland, “expressive meaning” is one of the three planes we experience while listening to music. I won’t go into the specifics (I do recommend reading the wonderfully accessible book), but he’s referring to a concrete meaning: is the piece about romance? Grief? A train? An argument? The more difficult it is to pin a piece down to one meaning, the more successful the piece is. I found this useful not only as a musician, but as a writer, and I suspect it carries over to most art forms.
Circling back to the Dickinson, it would be difficult to say if the poem is about wanting to forget a lover or wanting to remember him, a desire for control in helpless situations or an expression of helplessness, or even an examination of the numerous components at work in love: the heart, the mind, the other, time.
Copland’s setting of “Heart, we will forget him” is full of changes in dynamics and tempo. The first line of the poem starts piano with a “dragging” tempo, before it crescendos into mezzo-forte on “forget him” and reaches a tempo. This wave effect is repeated in the second line before stabilizing in a mezzo-forte on “You may forget the warmth he gave” and moving forward on “I will forget the light.” The word “forget” is always sung in mezzo-forte, as though the speaker is half-trying to convince herself it’s what she wants (why not forte?).
The line “That I my thoughts may dim” is the song’s climax, the “I” written in a three-beat fortissimo. “Haste! lest while you’re lagging” returns to piano, and the last line increases to mezzo-piano. “Him” is ingeniously written in a fermata, illustrating how much the speaker does not want to let go of “him.”
The octave jumps in the vocal line mirror the conflicting meanings in the speaker’s words, and like Dickinson’s poem, there is a disguised simplicity in the piano, as it repeats sequences with the slightest of modifications. It is a fantastic piece.
Salon friends, have you found an “expressive meaning” in Dickinson’s poem or Copland’s music that we haven’t examined? I’d love to discuss.
This week the rain is to return, and while I dread it, I’m sure it will be good for my writing. I’ll be off for a short stay at Oxford for the Kellogg College Scholar’s Dinner, a welcome evening of celebration amidst many fast approaching deadlines.
Bonne semaine everyone, et à la prochaine !
Rachel
Thanks for making me discover this piece. What a beautiful poem (and thoughtful adaptation to music)!