STUART SAUNDERS SMITH's WORKS for PERCUSSION and SPOKEN WORD by Elizabeth L. Soflin

Text as Music, Music as Text: Stuart Saunders Smith's Works for Percussion and Spoken Word

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Authors Soflin, Elizabeth Louise

Publisher The University of Arizona.

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TEXT AS MUSIC, MUSIC AS TEXT: STUART SAUNDERS SMITH’S WORKS FOR

PERCUSSION AND SPOKEN WORD

Elizabeth L. Soflin

______

A Document Submitted to the Faculty of the

SCHOOL OF MUSIC

In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements

For the Degree of

DOCTOR OF MUSICAL ARTS

In the Graduate College

THE UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA

2017 2

THE UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA GRADUATE COLLEGE

As members of the Document Committee, we certify that we have read the document prepared by Elizabeth L. Soflin, titled Text as Music, Music as Text: Stuart Saunders Smith’s Works for Percussion and Spoken Word and recommend that it be accepted as fulfilling the document requirement for the Degree of Doctor of Musical Arts. ______Date:

Norman Weinberg

______Date:

John Milbauer

______Date:

Moisés Paiewonsky

Final approval and acceptance of this document is contingent upon the candidate’s submission of the final copies of the document to the Graduate College.

I hereby certify that I have read this document prepared under my direction and recommend that it be accepted as fulfilling the document requirement.

______Date:

Document Director: Norman Weinberg 3

STATEMENT BY AUTHOR

This document has been submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for an advanced degree at the University of Arizona and is deposited in the University Library to be made available to borrowers under rules of the Library.

Brief quotations from this document are allowable without special permission, provided that an accurate acknowledgement of the source is made. Requests for permission for extended quotation from or reproduction of this manuscript in whole or in part may be granted by the head of the major department or the Dean of the Graduate College when in his or her judgment the proposed use of the material is in the interests of scholarship. In all other instances, however, permission must be obtained from the author

SIGNED: Elizabeth L. Soflin 4

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This document has been a large effort in many ways, but thanks to the collaboration of other individuals, it has been a task I have largely enjoyed completing. I would like to specifically acknowledge the following individuals.

Stuart Saunders Smith was very kind to be through the process of writing this document, not only because he was willing to let me write about him, but also because he helped me to do it.

Thank you to my professor and advisor, Dr. Norman Weinberg and the members of my major committee, Dr. John Milbauer and Professor Moisés Paiewonsky, for investing in my degree program and career.

Thank you to Dr. Matthew Mugmon, for acting as a sounding board for much of this document. Thank you for putting so much extra time into reading my writing and being a mentor to me.

Thank you to Dr. John Brobeck, for teaching me well and reading early drafts of this research.

Thank you to Dr. Morris Palter, Dr. Andrew Bliss, Professor Keith Brown, and Dr. Andrew Spencer: for supporting my academic progress.

Lastly, thank you to Matt, my parents, my siblings, and my extended family for their support in every endeavor I have undertaken. 5

TABLE OF CONTENTS

LIST OF FIGURES 7

LIST OF MUSICAL EXAMPLES 8

ABSTRACT 10

CHAPTER 1 – INTRODUCTION 11

Purpose of Study 11

Thesis Statement 12

Review of Scholarly Literature 12

CHAPTER 2 – COMPOSITIONAL BACKGROUND 15

Smith’s Biography 15

The Problem of Classifying Interdisciplinary Works 16

Smith’s Rhythmic Language 17

Smith as Confessionalist 19

The Texted Works 20

The Definition of Speech-song 21

CHAPTER 3 – A CONTEXT FOR SOUND POETRY 24

The Futurists 24

Dada and Ursonate 29

Smith’s Exposure to Sound Poetry 33

CHAPTER 4 – SYNTHESIS OF TEXT AND INSTRUMENTAL MUSIC 38

The Problem of Notation as it Affects Speech 38

Smith’s Rhythmic Language Revisited 43

Scoring for Varied Sound Materials 47

Music as Language 52

Levels of Text Abstraction as Expressive Element 54 6

Combining Disparate Elements into Expressive Systems 56

Language-Based Music: Easter in Bingham 60

CHAPTER 5 – CONCLUSION 64

REFERENCES 65 7

LIST OF FIGURES

Figure 3.1. Russian Zaum’ Poetry by Kruchenykh 25

Figure 3.2. Italian Futurist Poetry by Marinetti 27

Figure 3.3. Hugo Ball, “Karawane” 29

Figure 3.4. Poetry of Emily Dickinson used in Stuart Saunders Smith’s The Authors 35

Figure 3.5. Brün, Futility 1964, Text 36

Figure 4.1. Smith’s realization of the rhythm of Some Household Words, Movement X 45

Figure 4.2. Photograph and Diagram of Performer Set-Up for Songs I-IX 46

Figure 4.3. Analysis of Peeping Tom Text and Rhythm Correlations 59

Figure 4.4. Division of Easter in Bingham into three major sections 61

LIST OF MUSICAL EXAMPLES

Musical Example 2.1. Smith, Home of the Brave, Mvmt. II, m. 24-28 17

Musical Example 2.2. Smith, Tunnels, Excerpt from Page 3 22

Musical Example 3.1. Adler, Zaum Box, “Vnafti” 28

Musical Example 3.2. Schwitters, Ursonate, Movement I Introduction 30

Musical Example 3.3. Smith, Songs I-IX, Excerpt from Song VI 31

Musical Example 3.4. Smith, Songs I-IX, Excerpt from Song VIII 34

Musical Example 3.5. Smith, By Language Embellished, I, Epilogue 37

Musical Example 4.1. Rzewski, To the Earth, mm. 6-20 39

Musical Example 4.2. Silverman, stars cars bars, mm. 82-91 41

Musical Example 4.3. Silverman, stars cars bars, mm. 1-34 42

Musical Example 4.4. Smith, Poems I II III, First Movement mm. 14-24 43

Musical Example 4.5. Smith, Some Household Words, Movement X 44

Musical Example 4.6. Smith, Songs I-IX, Excerpt from Song IX 46

Musical Example 4.7. Smith, Songs I-IX, Excerpt from Song IX 47

Musical Example 4.8. Smith, Songs I-IX, Excerpt from Song II 48

Musical Example 4.9. Smith, The Authors, “Chute” 49

Musical Example 4.10. Smith, The Authors, “Kerouac” 50

Musical Example 4.11. Smith, The Authors, “Kerouac” 51

Musical Example 4.12. Smith, The Authors, “Dickinson” 51

Musical Example 4.13. Aperghis, Le Corps a Corps, Excerpt from “Recit” 55

Musical Example 4.14. Globokar, Toucher, Opening Gestures 57

Musical Example 4.15. Senn, Peeping Tom, mm. 1-2 58

Musical Example 4.16. Smith, In Bingham, fifth movement 60

Musical Example 4.17. Smith, Easter in Bingham, Opening of saxophone solo 61 9

Musical Example 4.18. Smith, Easter in Bingham, Excerpt from Song IV 62

Musical Example 4.19. Smith, Easter in Bingham, Excerpt from Song V 62

Musical Example 4.20. Smith, Easter in Bingham, Opening of vibraphone solo 63

ABSTRACT

American composer Stuart Saunders Smith (b. 1948) has been active in the composition of contemporary art music for over forty years, composing over 200 musical and interdisciplinary works. His music ties the experimental world of contemporary music to his experiences living, composing, and teaching in the northeastern United States. Many of his works have included spoken word as a percussion instrument, either alone or blended with instrumental percussion writing.

Although not unique in blurring the boundaries between text and music, Stuart Saunders Smith’s texted percussion works manage to both belong to tradition and exist as a unique body of works, as can be seen by studying the context of their creation, technique in synthesizing music and text, and usage of text as melodic material.

CHAPTER 1 – INTRODUCTION

at a certain point,

one

begins…1

Purpose of Study

American composer Stuart Saunders Smith (b. 1948) has been active in the composition of contemporary art music for over forty years. He has composed over 200 musical and interdisciplinary works that tie the experimental world of contemporary music to his experiences on living, composing, and teaching in the northeastern United States. Scholarship about Smith’s music consists mainly of one book dedicated to his music and several articles in other books and journals that give either a broad overview of the entirety of Smith’s works or discuss one particular piece at a time.

With scholarship on Smith and his compositions generally consisting of the very broad and the extremely narrow, there remains an overlooked angle of study: in-depth exploration of genres in which Smith has been an innovator. One such area is the usage of poetry and spoken word in his instrumental pieces.

This document seeks to examine Stuart Saunders Smith’s works for text and percussion in three ways. The first is a discussion of their context, using a brief overview of sound poetry’s history.

The second is an examination of how Smith combines text and instrumental material in his compositions, tracing his development of compositional technique and comparing his works to those

1 Stuart Saunders Smith, “Composing, Thoughts,” in The Modern Percussion Revolution: Journeys of the Progressive Artist, edited by Kevin Lewis and Gustavo Aguilar (New York: Routledge, 2014), 226. 12 of other composers who also were working with text. Finally, this document analyzes how Smith treats text as a musical element and vice versa. This portion of the document explores Smith’s scoring and notation, rhythmic language, and usage of abstract text.

Thesis Statement

Although not alone or first in combining spoken text and music, Stuart Saunders Smith’s texted percussion works synthesize these elements to create unique expressive systems through the use of invented notation, speech-like rhythmic figures, a multitude of sound materials, and varied levels of text abstraction.

Review of Scholarly Literature

The preliminary stages of this research concern information about Stuart Saunders Smith’s biography, which makes it necessary to reference the one book that is dedicated to the study of his music: John Welsh’s The Music of Stuart Saunders Smith. Welsh’s book is dated in its discussion of the music composed by Smith, because Welsh obviously cannot discuss pieces composed by Smith since the book’s publication date in x1995. However, the biographical information included in The

Music of Stuart Saunders Smith is invaluable. There are also other sources that give some broad overview of Smith’s works, including a chapter of The Modern Percussion Revolution written by

Kevin Lewis as well as articles and theses by Zeca Lacerda and Matthew Timman.

Also, incredibly useful in the endeavor of researching Smith’s life and works are interviews that have been conducted with him by various authors. There are many such sources about Smith’s music. For this research, interviews are included that were conducted by Jeremy Muller, Tom

Goldstein, and Theresa Sauer for Percussive Notes, Perspectives of New Music, and the Notations 21

Project, respectively. There is also a lengthy interview with Smith in the appendices of the previously mentioned book by John Welsh. This author has studied and corresponded with Smith as well, and some references to personal communications are also used. 13

Smith is incredibly prolific in writing about his own works unprompted, as well. Most recently, he penned a chapter of The Modern Percussion Revolution about his compositional philosophy. He has written about his own works for Percussive Notes, Perspectives of New Music, and in the anthology Words and Spaces (for which he served as a contributing editor).

Theatrical music and sound poetry are topics that have inspired new scholarship in recent years. Two books – The New Music Theater: Seeing the Voice, Hearing the Body and Composed

Theatre: Aesthetics, Practices, Processes – proved very helpful in understanding the history of the genre and the current practices. Additionally, there are sources about theatrical music as it applies specifically to percussion. Julie Strom, in her 2012 dissertation, speaks about theatrical percussion, tracing the history of texted pieces back to early melodrama.2 Percussionist Bonnie Whiting, who is renowned for interpreting texted percussion works, specifically writes about performing texted music as a percussionist.3 For a more general history of sound poetry itself, The Sound of Poetry/The Poetry of Sound acts as an important resource. Specifically, this source contains a chapter penned by Nancy

Perloff entitled “Sound Poetry and the Musical Avant-Garde” that traces a history of sound poetry from antiquity to the twentieth century.4

However, even with the amount of available material about Smith and about theatrical music, scholarship on these works tends to make sweeping statements about all of Smith’s works or completely focus on one work in discussion. Occasionally, this occurs in the same source, as it does in The Music of Stuart Saunders Smith by John Welsh, where generalizations are made and then

Tunnels is the only work of the genre analyzed in full. In fact, upon surveying the literature, there is

2 Julie J. Strom, “Theater Percussion: Developing a Twenty-First Century Genre through the Connection of Visual, Dramatic, and Percussive Arts” (Doctor of Arts dissertation, University of Northern Colorado, 2012), 26. 3 Bonnie Whiting, “The Speaking Percussionist as Storyteller,” in The Modern Percussion Revolution: Journeys of the Progressive Artist, edited by Kevin Lewis and Gustavo Aguilar (New York: Routledge, 2014), 84- 111. 4 Nancy Perloff, “Sound Poetry and the Musical Avant-Garde,” in The Sound of Poetry/The Poetry of Sound, ed. Marjorie Perloff and Craig Dworkin (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 97-117, Kindle.

14 only a single dissertation that focuses on one of the theatre pieces: …And Points North, as covered in a performance guide written by Darin Wadley.5 Other pieces are mentioned in an overarching study of Smith’s music, but there are no resources that aim only to speak about the theatre music of Smith.

The purpose of this research is to provide context and analysis for Smith’s texted percussion works, which has no precedent in the existing scholarly literature. This is dependent on synthesizing research about Smith’s music with research about the works of composers who preceded him as well as contemporaries. This research also depends on original analysis of scores in order to fully understand how his works belong to the tradition of poetry as music while also retaining an identity as a unique body of work in and of themselves.

5 Darin Joseph Wadley, “…And Points North by Stuart Saunders Smith: An Examination of Musical Influences and a Performer’s Guide” (DMA diss., University of Arizona, 1998).

CHAPTER 2 – COMPOSITIONAL BACKGROUND

I compose through experience.

I watch a composition unfold.

Ideas have little place…

hear.

Each day I see what will happen.6

To fully ground the comparative study of Stuart Saunders Smith’s texted percussion works that will be discussed in this document, it is necessary to first discuss Smith’s biography, the genres in which he is active, and an overview of his compositional style. Milton Babbitt wrote about Smith that the links between his biography and his compositions “are not only intra- and inter- compositional, but between and among his vocations as composer, performer, teacher, writer, anthologist, editor, entrepreneur, philomath, and musical activist.”7 John Welsh wrote in The Music of Stuart Saunders Smith that “the music of Stuart Smith is where jazz, the avant-garde, and sound- poetry coalesce.”8 Scholars who focus on Smith often marvel at the amount of variety his compositional catalog contains, and this is due to the amount of variety his influences encompass.

Smith’s Biography

Stuart Saunders Smith was born in 1948 in Maine. His musical study began at the age of six with drum lessons with Charles Newcomb, whose previous career playing as a vaudeville musician led him to stress to the young Smith the importance of learning music in a variety of styles. As a young teen, Smith was a drummer in his school band/orchestra program, a Dixieland group, and a free-jazz group. He cited these early experiences as catalysts for the highly contrapuntal nature of the

6 Smith, “Composing, Thoughts,” 226. 7 Milton Babbitt, foreword to The Music of Stuart Saunders Smith, by John Welsh (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1995), xiii. 8 John Welsh, The Music of Stuart Saunders Smith (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1995), xxv.

16 music he would write as a composer, and also as the inspiration for his music of coexistence wherein players perform their individual parts without attempting to make them line up rhythmically in order to create an ever-changing musical texture.9

Smith attended the Hartt School, the performing arts conservatory of the University of

Hartford, receiving his undergraduate and master’s degrees in music composition. During this time he was active as an organizer of ensembles and events dedicated to experimental art forms. He then completed his education with a doctorate in music composition from the University of Illinois, after which he served as a composition professor at the University of Maryland – Baltimore County.10 He has since retired from this position and now resides in Vermont with his wife, Sylvia Smith, who is a percussionist and the publisher for most of Smith’s works.

The Problem of Classifying Interdisciplinary Works

Jeremy Muller, in the introduction to his 2014 interview with Smith for Percussive Notes, states that Smith’s musical output can be divided into five distinct genres: “rhythmic intricacy, musical theatre, musical portraits, music of mobiles/coexistence, and trans-media.”11 Previously,

John Welsh divided Smith’s output into only four categories: open-form compositions, trans-media systems, speech songs, and traditionally notated scores.12 Still other writers have made different assertions about how to divide Smith’s output into neat categories.

Assigning these boundaries as lines between genres and mediums in Smith’s music can be problematic. For instance, if rhythmic intricacy is a separate category than musical theatre, how can one account for the fact that The Authors (2006) is a single-player opera that contains both texted musical material and complex polyrhythms? Moreover, if Welsh can make the assertion that trans-

9 Stuart Saunders Smith and Tom Goldstein, “Inner-Views,” Perspectives of New Music 36, no. 2 (Summer 1998): 196-198. 10 Welsh, The Music of Stuart Saunders Smith, xxvii-xxx. 11 Jeremy Muller, “Amidst the Noise: Stuart Saunders Smith’s Percussion Music,” Percussive Notes 52, no. 4 (July 2014): 7. 12 Welsh, The Music of Stuart Saunders Smith, xxx. 17 media and speech-songs are disparate genres, why does he also state that sound poems are a subset of trans-media?13 Based on the amount of literature attempting to provide an overview of Smith’s works, it is clear that his catalog is highly diversified and difficult to classify. Many of his works have features fitting at least two of the categories given as separate genres. This is because Smith’s musical influences have been varied, causing his output to be likewise varied, even within individual pieces!

The connecting link in Smith’s musical catalog is probably his intent to force an audience to listen deeply, since they cannot predict what might come next.14 However, Smith has stylistic fingerprints that appear in a much of his musical output: the aforementioned blurring of boundaries between genres, a unique approach to writing rhythms, and a tendency to write pieces that are autobiographical. It is more useful in a study of his works to discuss these trademarks rather than attempt to sort his catalog into a definite listing by genre.

Smith’s Rhythmic Language

Smith’s music is known for its rhythmic complexity. It is common to find in his scores, for example, a triplet presented simultaneously with a quintuplet. It is also not unusual within these rhythmic groupings for some notes in each figure to be omitted, further obscuring the beat pattern and meter.

Musical Example 2.1. Smith, Home of the Brave, Mvmt. II, m. 24-2815

13 Ibid., 88. 14 Stuart Saunders Smith, “To Suffer Music,” Perspectives of New Music 34, no. 1 (Winter 1996): 106. 15 Stuart Saunders Smith, The Home of the Brave (Sharon, VT: Smith Publications, 2009). 18

In addition to intricacy in his rhythmic figures, Smith’s music often does not include bar lines or time signatures. This can make his scores intimidating to the novice interpreter. However, Smith’s rhythmic language is not meant to create anything formidable. Rather, he attempts in his music to imitate the irregular rhythms of human speech.16 This also extends to a more general idea of transcribing the human experience rhythmically:

A lot of people look at my scores and say, “My god it’s all cerebral! It’s full of all these numbers.” Well, I’m after making a music that floats, that doesn’t exist in slicing up time evenly, and gives the audience a very rich, organic listening experience. You know, we’re made up of all these different organs, and each one has a different rhythm; the stomach has different rhythms than the brain, the brain has different rhythms than the breathing. We are walking polyrhythms. I’m trying to express who we are corporeally, and you have to do that with numbers.17

Although Smith’s music includes very intricate rhythmic figures, his intent is at odds with the idea of rhythmic complexity, since he is interested in expressing something innate to the human experience. He is also very interested in creating music that fosters an active listening experience for an audience. He does this in his rhythmic language by actively eschewing duple meter and repetition.

I instinctively recoil at duple rhythms. They push the pitches around like an assembly line. Duple rhythms block off time into equidistant units. The only interest such rhythms have is where the composer has tried to hide the downbeat with syncopation, or passages that obscure the duple world. Politically, I associate duple rhythms with herd instincts – mass rallies of any kind. Large peace rallies are no different to me than a military band marching in unison. Both rely on a kind of hysteria deeply embedded in the human propensity for violence.18

Some might view these complicated rhythms as an indicator that Smith belongs to the school of “New Complexity” with fellow composers Brian Ferneyhough, James Dillon, and Michael

Finnissy. This assumption comes from the notion that Smith’s music is in some way attempting to surpass the “old complexity” of serialism and that he intends to, among other things, explore beyond the constructs that have traditionally been assigned to Western music: harmony, meter, and formal

16 Smith and Goldstein, “Inner Views,” 191. 17 Muller, “Amidst the Noise,” 9. 18 Theresa Sauer, “Interview with Stuart Saunders Smith and Sylvia Smith,” Notations 21 Project, March 2008, accessed April 17, 2015, https://notations21.wordpress.com/interview-with-stuart-saunders-smith-and-sylvia- smith/. 19 structure.19 However, the extent of his similarity to this school of composers is a matter open to debate, as Smith said himself, “I no longer refer to my music as complex. I refer to it as intricate.”20

Smith as Confessionalist

Stuart Saunders Smith is not only a prolific composer but is also an author who has written prolifically about his own work. This shows a lack of separation between Smith as composer and

Smith as person. In his thesis on the topic of Smith’s drum set works as inspired by confessional literature, percussionist Matthew Timman writes that there is direct linkage between Smith’s autobiographical compositional style and the philosophy of the confessional poets whose works spoke about personal matters instead of more detached narrative or description.21 The poets belonging to the confessional school, which emerged in the late 1950s and early 1960s, are characterized by the intensely personal nature of their work. Their poems often deal in difficult subjects like death, mental illness, and relationships in an explicitly autobiographical manner.22

This trademark of creating music with an autobiographical lens is most pronounced in the portion of Smith’s catalog that he calls his “Family Portraits”. These works are meant to paint a picture of a person or place important to Smith at some point in his life. They include portraits of his wife, his parents, and even a self-portrait. Smith also often uses his texted pieces to speak about himself and his heritage. …And Points North, In Bingham, and Easter in Bingham all touch on his experiences growing up in Maine.

In a less explicit way, Smith reveals autobiographical information by letting his religious beliefs as a Quaker inform his compositions. This appears in his music through his equation of

19 Kevin Lewis, “The Search for Self: an Exploration of the Percussion Music of Stuart Saunders Smith,” in The Modern Percussion Revolution: Journeys of the Progressive Artist, ed. Kevin Lewis and Gustavo Aguilar (New York, Routledge, 2014), 135-137. 20 Muller, “Amidst the Noise,” 9. 21 Matthew Timman, “The Drum Set Works of Stuart Saunders Smith as a correlative trilogy through compositional unity and autobiographical content as confession” (MM Thesis, Bowling Green State University, 2014), 1. 22 “A Brief Guide to Confessional Poetry,” Academy of American Poets, last modified February 21, 2014, accessed March 20, 2017, https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/text/brief-guide-confessional-poetry. 20 rhythmic periodicity and repetition with violence and herd mentality, which leads him to avoid these elements. The influence of Quaker meetings also appears throughout his works; these meetings are unled and involve contribution of all in attendance speaking when they are divinely moved. Smith’s writing of music that functions in a speech-like manner and music which functions with each part coexisting reflects these experiences.23

A clearer link between Smith and the confessional poets is Smith’s way of relating stories about his struggles with mental illness and the similar struggles members of his family also faced.

Smith suffers from bipolar disorder and often chooses to use this in his music.24 In particular, his pieces Lazarus and Delbert speak frankly about mental illness. Specifically, Lazarus contains a story about an experience Smith had while hospitalized for a medication change, and Delbert is a musical portrait of Smith’s great-grandfather who died chained to a wall in an asylum.

Smith also links himself to the confessional poets by alluding to them in his works. In

Thinking about Anne Sexton, Smith pairs a solo vibraphonist with an actress portraying confessional poet Anne Sexton speaking an original text. In The Authors, Smith uses words written by Sylvia

Plath, also a confessional poet.

The Texted Works

This document focuses on Smith’s texted percussion music. This includes works where one performer delivers spoken text and performs instrumental material simultaneously and also works which are comprised only of text. Smith’s early interest in sound poetry began when, at the age of fifteen, he wrote his first poem which was entitled “A Time to Be”. This poem later appeared as the text for one of the movements of his first published composition to include spoken word, Poems I II

III.25A survey of Smith’s published scores, found in the catalog of works published by Smith

23 Lewis, “The Search for Self,” 137. 24 Smith, “Composing, Thoughts,” 273. 25 Welsh, The Music of Stuart Saunders Smith, xxvii. 21

Publications, reveals that out of fifteen scores known to have spoken text, eight of them can be performed by a solo percussionist. Five of the remaining works use percussion instruments, though they are not intended to be performed by a percussion soloist. Only two of these fifteen works cannot be performed by a solo percussionist.26

Some of Smith’s texted works are not for a specific instrument but can be played by a percussionist. One such work is Tunnels, which is for any solo performer using a stringed, keyboard, or percussion instrument. Also included in the scope of this research are works such as In Bingham and By Language Embellished I, which are almost solely made up of unaccompanied text. To defend the viewpoint that these works belong to Smith’s percussion repertoire, one can use Smith’s own words. He writes, “These songs are for speaking, where the internal rhythms of individual words, phrases, and sentences are the focus. While there may exist, in some of the speech-songs, a poetic image, pun or other linguistic convention, these are incidental to the heart of my concept of a word music using the voice as a drum.”27

Smith’s usage of the human voice as a percussive instrument implies a homogeneity in works combining a spoken element with percussion sounds. Because percussionists are not limited by a need to use an airstream to initiate instrumental sounds, they have ample opportunity to speak and move freely throughout a piece. It is probably for this reason, as well as his and his wife’s backgrounds as percussionists, that Smith’s texted output tends to focus on percussion.

The Definition of Speech-song

A specific concept referenced within this research is speech-song. This refers to a style of composition that is inspired by the rhythm of human speech and of free-form poetry. This is different from the Schoenbergian concept of Sprechstimme, because Sprechstimme refers to a style of intoning

26 “Catalog of Printed and Recorded Music,” Smith Publications, accessed August 1, 2016, http://www.smith-publications.com/assets/catalog/Smith%202009%20Catalog.pdf. 27 Stuart Saunders Smith, “Percussion in Discussion (Language, Percussion, and My Speech Songs),” Percussive Notes 31, no. 8 (December 1993): 71. 22 text and speech-song refers to the way that words are chosen for their rhythm. About the genre,

Kevin Lewis writes, “The listener is provided a syntax that seems familiar, yet a cognitive dissonance is created when the semantic expectation is not fulfilled.”28 According to John Welsh, “Smith does not claim to be a poet, but rather one who composes music with the sounds of words.”29

Musical Example 2.2. Smith, Tunnels, Excerpt from Page 330

As can be seen in the preceding musical example, the text used is comprised of familiar

English words. In this particular example, the words retain some adherence to syntactical rules of subject and verb relationship, but are strung together in a way that doesn’t make semantic sense as a narrative. In other works, however, Smith does away with both semantics and syntax. Not all of

Smith’s texted works make use of this technique, but it is vital to understand how it applies since

Smith uses this term frequently to describe his own works.

Speech-song is only one way that Smith uses text within his works. A driving characteristic of speech-song is that it is not explicitly narrative because the words are not chosen for a literal purpose. In some of Smith’s works, though, the words are written in a more narrative form. This

28 Lewis, “The Search for Self,” 147. 29 Welsh, The Music of Stuart Saunders Smith, 145. 30 Stuart Saunders Smith, Tunnels (Baltimore, MD: Sonic Art Editions, 1988). 23 includes Delbert, which uses a text that tells a story about Smith’s great grandfather. Also in this category is Lazarus, in which Smith recounts meeting a suicidal man in a mental hospital.

Sometimes, speech-song and narrative text coexist within the same piece. Examples of this include

Songs I-IX, which in its sixth movement uses a speech-song made up of nonsensical syllables immediately followed by a narrative joke that ends in a punch line. Smith’s very first texted work,

Poems I II III, uses traditional poetry, speech-song, and a hybrid of the two.31

31 Stuart Saunders Smith, “Stuart Saunders Smith,” in Words and Spaces: An Anthology of Twentieth Century Musical Experiments in Language and Sonic Environments, ed. Stuart Saunders Smith and Thomas DeLio (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1989), 129-130. 24

CHAPTER 3 – A CONTEXT FOR SOUND POETRY

Communication can make an evolving commune,

intramural and intergenerational.32

Stuart Saunders Smith is not the first composer to use text as a musical element, nor will he be the last. In order to fully appreciate how his texted works fit into this musical canon and the legacies that inspired him, it becomes necessary to understand the history of this kind of musical composition and how it may have influenced him as a composer. Although sound poetry is looked upon as a twentieth-century phenomenon, it actually has precedent in the centuries before that. For instance, there are many Shaker poems that use wordless syllables to explore how these might be perceived as “wordless tunes” and these can be traced back into the nineteenth century.33 We could continue working back from this and discover that the origins of poetry as music can be traced back to ancient and medieval chant practices.34

The Futurists

For the purposes of studying twentieth-century sound poetry as performance art, scholars begin not in America or Western Europe, but in Russia. Nancy Perloff, in her research about the topic of sound poetry as it relates to musicology, argues that the Russian avant-garde poets of the early twentieth century were first to isolate the sound of language as the focal point of composition, rather than always being focused on meaning.35 These poets wrote in a language they called zaum’, which roughly translates to “beyond the mind”. The term was coined by Alexsei Kruchenykh and was used to describe the radical linguistic experiments of Russian Futurists between 1913 and

32 Smith, “Composing, Thoughts,” 265. 33 Welsh, The Music of Stuart Saunders Smith, 88. 34 Perloff, “Sound Poetry and the Musical Avant-Garde,” 98. 35 Ibid., 99. 25

1923.36 Zaum’ techniques included development of the roots of words (e.g., adding suffixes or prefixes) and placing words on the page that appear to rhyme when written but don’t when spoken out loud.37 There was also a new emphasis on placing written language into abstract forms on the page, creating visual art which was then interpreted as sound art in performance.38

Figure 3.1. Russian Zaum’ Poetry by Kruchenykh39

36 Christopher Adler, “Transrational Language and Invented Musical Worlds in Zaum Box” (paper presented at Transplanted Roots Percussion Research Symposium, Montreal, Canada, September 19, 2015). 37 Perloff, “Sound Poetry and the Musical Avant-Garde,” 100-101. 38 Adler, “Transrational Language and Invented Musical Worlds in Zaum Box.” 39 Alexei Kruchenych and Velimir Khlebnikov, Te li le (St. Petersburg: Publisher Not Identified, 1914), 6, Internet Archive, accessed October 3, 2016, http://archive.org/stream/gri_000r33125010870794. 26

Through zaum’, Russian Futurists created works that are meant to be performed in order to experience their structure and intent. Interestingly, these experiments in language had some crossover into the musical realm; in 1913, a Russian Futurist opera entitled Victory Over the Sun, with zaum’ libretto by Kruchenykh was premiered in St. Petersburg.40

The works of the Italian Futurists were also created both as works to be looked at and to be performed. According to Perloff, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti (1876-1944), a poet considered to be the founder of the Italian Futurist movement, sought to “free words from the straitjacket of the sentence by abolishing syntax, punctuation, adjectives, adverbs, and conjunctions and by retaining verbs as action words.”41 These works are even more dependent on typographic construction than the

Russian zaum’ poetry; they often feature words arranged on the page to form images, printed in different colored ink, and chosen for onomatopoeic purposes.42

40 “Alexei Kruchenykh, et. Al.: Victory Over the Sun,” Monoskop Log: Writings on Arts, Culture, and Media Technology, last modified October 19, 2012, accessed October 1, 2016, https://monoskop.org/log/?p=6044. 41 Perloff, “Sound Poetry and the Musical Avant-Garde,” 107. 42 Ibid., 108. 27

Figure 3.2. Italian Futurist Poetry by Marinetti43

Smith’s works share some characteristics with the works of these early sound poets. It seems that he owes a debt to the Futurists for the creation of poetry that is chiefly meant to be performed rather than read in a book. Smith’s ideas about developing words for their sound is different from ideas of development of words by adding suffixes and changing their parts of speech, but the idea of

43 F. T. Marinetti, L'imagination Sans Fils Et Les Mots En Liberte: Manifeste Futuriste (Milan: Direction Du Mouvement Futuriste, 1913), 101, Monoskop, accessed October 5, 2016, https://monoskop.org/images/c/c8/ Marinetti_FT_Les_mots_en_liberte_futuristes.pdf.

28 development itself is still very much at the forefront in both repertories. Also, it is important to note that unlike the early Dadaists, who are discussed later in this chapter, the Futurists’ works and

Smith’s works both usually use the word as the unit of musical material instead of breaking words down into nonsense.

Smith’s works also resemble the Futurists’ to the extent of abolishing some rules of grammar, though his works are composed with less concern for the way they look typographically on the page and more for their sound. Other composers have written works that are more directly related to the zaum’ tradition; for instance, Christopher Adler’s 2016 work Zaum Box is a set of short compositions for speaking percussionist. Each of the compositions sets a single zaum poem, and the notation that

Adler chooses to use in some of them is inspired by the creative typography of Futurist poetry. By contrast, the notation of Smith in his texted works is utilitarian.

Musical Example 3.1. Adler, Zaum Box, “Vnafti”44

44 Adler, “Transrational Language and Invented Musical Worlds in Zaum Box.” 29

Dada and the Ursonate

Another important movement in the development sound poetry was that of Dada, which grew out of the crisis of World War I as a way to question authority and hierarchy. This also led to the questioning through this movement about what an artist is, suggesting that anything could be art.45

Sound poems, or poems without words, were an important art form to the Dadaists. They were constructed from abstract, untranslatable syllables, which reflected a loss of faith in the truth of the spoken word and a protest of nationalism that was dividing Europe.46

German Dadaist Hugo Ball was a pivotal figure in the early development of the sound poem.

He premiered his poem “Karawane” (Caravan) at his Cabaret Voltaire in 1916. 47 As can be seen in the following figure, this poem, which is meant for live performance, depends completely on nonsense syllables that are onomatopoeic in nature. There is also an emphasis on creative typography, similar to what can be seen when looking at the works of the Futurists.

Figure 3.3. Hugo Ball, “Karawane”

45 "Home," Dada Companion, accessed October 19, 2016, http://www.dada-companion.com/. 46 "Hugo Ball," Dada, National Gallery of Art, accessed October 19, 2016, http://www.nga.gov/exhibitions/2006/dada/artists/ball.shtm. 47 Ibid. 30

Another great influence on composers using text as musical material is found in the

Ursonate, which was written by German Dadaist Kurt Schwitters between 1922 and 1932. This work is a long-form performance piece that is structured as a classical four-movement sonata, complete with thematic development of the sounds used and recapitulations of these themes. The full score, as it was first published, necessitated a phonetic notation. This is because the sounds used are not actually words, but Schwitters imagined them pronounced as if they belonged to the German language.48

Musical Example 3.2. Schwitters, Ursonate, Movement I Introduction.49

The Ursonate is a landmark in the medium of sound poetry because it is the first sound poem to be treated purposefully as a musical score, here in a classical form. Smith’s formal structure in his

48 Perloff, “Sound Poetry and the Musical Avant-Garde,” 108. 49 Kurt Schwitters, Ursonate (Hannover: Merzverlag, 1932). 31 music tends to take a backseat to the melody, stating that a main goal is “obfuscating the form”.50

However, he does use tight formal construction in several of his early speech-songs including In

Bingham and Tunnels, which relates these works closely to the influence of the Ursonate:

In Bingham is a song cycle—there are seven songs. There are two vocal characterizations— one being a “normal” speaking voice, the other a Maine accent. The language is conventional from a poetic standpoint. They are dealing with a sense of loss. In Tunnels, I use song form— A B A’—the first part of the song consists of phonemes and letters developed from the title, Tunnels. The middle part is a linguistic investigation of all the meanings of the word “tunnels.”51

Although Smith owes a great debt to Schwitters for usage of musical form to describe poetry, the usage of syllables rather than words that appears in Ursonate very rarely appears in Smith’s works. It appears most notably in the sixth movement of his Songs I-IX and in the fourth movement of By Language Embellished, I.

Musical Example 3.3. Smith, Songs I-IX, Excerpt from Song VI52

50 Welsh, The Music of Stuart Saunders Smith, 324. 51 Ibid., 157-159. 52 Stuart Saunders Smith, Songs I-IX (Sharon, VT: Smith Publications, 1987). 32

Some parallels can be drawn between the Dadaist mistrust of language as political propaganda begetting violence and Smith’s Quakerism manifesting as pacifism. However, unlike the

Dadaists, Smith does not seem to believe in a complete abolition of using words in favor of creating untranslatable works. For the most part, his works are comprised of English words. This means that although his music sounds strange because it dispenses with syntax/semantics (either or both), the elements that he is using are familiar to the audience hearing it performed. Compared to this, the

Dada beliefs about annihilating the English language and the boundaries between art and life seem very extreme, and are more associated with John Cage than Stuart Saunders Smith.

Cage, who was an acquaintance of Smith’s, encountered the Dada movement through the music of Erik Satie, whose music would influence him for the rest of his life.53 Cage, like Smith, wrote works for speaker, one of the most famous being 45’ for a Speaker, which was written in 1954.

This text is written in the first person, but does not deliver a narrative. Cage used chance procedure to compose the work, which causes it to jump from one subject to the next frequently.54 Smith does not use chance procedures in his texted compositions, but the difference between his text choices and those of Cage are more fundamental than that. For the Dadaists and Neo-Dadaists (like Cage) who write sound poetry, text is mistrusted in providing meaning and is treated impersonally and somewhat irreverently. For Smith, text is used in a unique manner, but he treats it in a way that is purposeful and earnest, even when leaning toward humor. Cage wanted to free his music from expressing his inner self; Smith composes music that is about himself and let others interpret and transform it to express their inner selves.55

53 William Fetterman, John Cage’s Theatre Pieces: Notations and Performances (New York: Routledge, 1996), 16. 54 Whiting, “The Speaking Percussionist as Storyteller, 99. 55 Lewis, “The Search for Self,” 155. 33

Smith’s Exposure to Sound Poetry

Smith probably wasn’t exposed to the aforementioned examples of sound poetry before he wrote his first sound poem at the age of fifteen – a poem which later made its way into his first texted percussion composition.56 However, because he was playing jazz music at this time, he encountered

Beat poetry, which was often accompanied by a small jazz combo.57 Because he, by his own admission, was already writing poetry based on words that he liked saying as a youngster, it makes sense that Smith began using words in his musical compositions as well.

Although Smith’s earliest attempts at sound poetry were written before his collegiate composition study (and possibly before he could discover the work of other sound poets), once he began his doctoral work, he found himself studying with a composer who was also considering the ways in which text could be incorporated into music: Herbert Brün, Smith’s teacher during his studies at the University of Illinois. Brün’s thoughts on music as a communicative art were many, but they centered on an idea that he called anticommunication:

Anticommunication is an attempt at saying something, not a refusal of saying it. Communication is achievable by learning from language how to say something. Anticommunication is an attempt at respectfully teaching language to say it. It is not to be confused with either non-communication, where no communication is intended, or with lack of communication, where a message is ignored, has gone astray or simply is not understood. Anticommunication is most easily observed, and often can have an almost entertaining quality, if well-known fragments of a linguistic system are composed into a contextual environment in which they try but fail to mean what they always had meant, and, instead, begin showing traces of integration into another linguistic system, in which, who knows, they might one day mean what they never meant before, and be communicative again…Every thought, idea, or concept, as it emerges for the first time in a given society, needs words so that it be expressed, be presented, be heard, understood and finally communicated. In search of such language one has to either create new words, or add and attach new meanings to old words. If a word, in the course of time and usage, has accumulated many kinds, shades, and nuances of meaning, then we have to consider the context in which the word appears in order to know which particular meaning it is to carry. From this it follows that a new meaning of a

56 Welsh, The Music of Stuart Saunders Smith, xxvii. 57 Ibid., 150. 34

word may be suspected, or assumed, if the context is such that none of the conventional meanings would fit.58

This attitude is an apt description of many of Smith’s speech-songs where words are used for the sounds that they make melodically. As is stated in scholarship many times, he sees no difference between the elements making up language and the sound of more traditionally notated music.59 For instance, throughout works such as Some Household Words and Songs I-IX, Smith uses words outside of their usual contextual meaning to communicate something new. In the following musical example from Songs I-IX, using spoken word with jar lids, frying pan, metal bowl, and ratchet, Smith uses words delivered in angry tones along with harsh sounding instruments to communicate intense emotional states in a new way, devoid of any preset narrative. This allows him to communicate with an audience without telling them specifically how to respond.

Musical Example 3.4. Smith, Songs I-IX, Excerpt from Song VIII

Even in works where Smith’s setting of text is not purposely devoid of semantics, Brün’s idea of anticommunication can be found. Interestingly, this may be best illustrated in The Authors, a work in which Smith does not use his own words; rather, he sets the words of famous American authors for a speaking/singing marimbist. The third movement is based around the works of Emily

Dickinson and uses three of her poems, which appear in the following figure.

58 Herbert Brün, “Herbert Brün,” in Words and Spaces: An Anthology of Twentieth Century Musical Experiments in Language and Sonic Environments, ed. Stuart Saunders Smith and Thomas DeLio (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1989), 39. 59 Welsh, The Music of Stuart Saunders Smith, 145.

Of God we ask one favor, The pedigree of honey Beauty crowds me till I die, That we may be forgiven - Does not concern the bee; Beauty, mercy have on me! For what, he is presumed to know - A clover, any time, to him But if I expire today, The Crime, from us, is hidden - Is aristocracy. Let it be in sight of thee. Immured the whole of Life Within a magic Prison We reprimand the Happiness That too competes with Heaven.

Figure 3.4. Poetry of Emily Dickinson used in Stuart Saunders Smith’s The Authors60

These three Dickinson poems were not originally written as a set. However, Smith has chosen to use them together because of the narrative he creates with their thematic material. The theme represented in “Of God we ask one favor” is dissatisfaction in the human condition when it is tied down by religion; the material in “The pedigree of honey” is a metaphor about enjoying life’s simplicity. Finally, in “Beauty crowds me till I die”, Dickinson expresses the joy in being overwhelmed by beauty. By choosing not to acknowledge that these are separate texts, Smith makes a new point: because it is such a simple thing to be overwhelmed by the beautiful things in the world, why must we always be so concerned about our transgressions? In this way, Smith reflects his teacher’s ideas of creating new meaning with old words; here this is expressed in a very broad sense by using words from well-known writers in a new way.

This is not to say that Smith’s texted works are merely an offshoot of those of his teacher.

While Smith’s works seem to espouse Brün’s ideas of anticommunication by creating new images or ideas using words outside their conventional purpose with or without syntax, Brün’s works often involve a direct, obvious questioning of our concepts of language. For instance, his work Futility

1964 (aptly named after the year of its composition) reads as a kind of treatise on the idea of

60 Emily Dickinson, The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson (Boston: Little, Brown, 1924), Bartleby.com, 2000, www.bartleby.com/113/.

36 communication. The text for this work for narrator and electronic tape appears in Figure 3.4 as Brün reprints it in his chapter of Words and Spaces, an anthology edited by Smith and Thomas DeLio.61

If you were not yet to understand the meaning that was conveyed to these events of sound it would be understandable

for it is believable that you do not yet believe in hearing the sounds of events as they call on you to create the suitable language that will let you say to yourself that which is said to you just once and never again for the first and the last time

There is no second time since a language gained is a language lost

And to even try to tell you this seems a sheer waste of time for it is language and thus lost Figure 3.5. Brün, Futility 1964, Text62

As seen here, this work (like others of Brün) is self-referential and somewhat vague, and the innovation of the text is largely that it speaks about the limits of language itself. It would be misleading to say that Smith’s musical works never explore this topic, but it is only specifically acknowledged in the text of By Language Embellished, I.

61 Brün, “Herbert Brün,” 36. 62 Ibid., 36. 37

Musical Example 3.5. Smith, By Language Embellished, I, Excerpt from Epilogue63

In most instances, though Smith is using language in a new way, he doesn’t explicitly reference it in his texts. Kevin Lewis states, “Whereas Brün abandoned directly-communicative language altogether, some of Smith’s works have attempted to repurpose language by creating a new situation for it.”64

Further, the work of Brün’s is very striking in the way that it appears on the page with increasing indentation for each line of text, a facet that is not apparent in performances of the piece.

This is also a feature that Brün’s works share with those of the Futurists before him. Smith’s works for spoken word alone tend to group text into stanzas in a very functional manner that delineates with dots where pauses should be taken and with stage directions where the inflection should change.

As influential as Smith’s predecessors and teachers who used text in composition may have been, it is also telling to look at how Smith’s works evolve stylistically from the beginnings of his work as a composer and how he approaches some of the problems in truly incorporating text as a musical element. This involves looking at some of these difficulties and also comparing the problem- solving approaches of other composers to Smith’s. The next chapters will engage with these topics.

63 Stuart Saunders Smith, By Language Embellished, I (Baltimore, MD: Sonic Art Editions, 2007). 64 Lewis, “The Search for Self,” 145-146. 38

CHAPTER 4 – SYNTHESIS OF TEXT AND INSTRUMENTAL MUSIC

The music is bound by the score,

but not bound up

in the score.65

The Problem of Notation as it Affects Speech

A concern in writing music that incorporates text with instrumental elements, particularly if writing for one performer to do both, is that the musical material often affects the text. In other words, the music on the printed score may alter a natural-sounding reading of the poetic material by changing the rhythm and stress of the words. In order to appreciate Smith’s approach to this problem, it is necessary to begin by looking at those taken by other composers working in this medium.

One piece that demonstrates this problem is Frederic Rzewski’s To the Earth, composed in

1985. This piece is written for a solo percussionist performing on four flowerpots and reciting a

Homeric hymn in honor of the earth. Percussionist Steven Schick, in his book The Percussionist’s

Art: Same Bed, Different Dreams, writes about the work from the viewpoint of the performer:

The goal in To the Earth lies in finding a flexible linkage between flowerpots and voice; the goal is two lines in dynamic rapport, neither one is shackled to nor estranged from the other one. This balance is critical. If the flowerpots pull the text too far in the direction of their flatness, words become wooden and a prayerful text sounds like an empty recitation. The sense of a “common” aesthetic experience becomes merely ordinary. If the reverse situation occurs and the voice pulls the flowerpots towards oratory, then their presence in the piece becomes artificial, and both simplicity and universality are lost.66

Schick’s aim in speaking about To the Earth is to discuss a universal problem in for the speaking percussionist: the difficulty in maintaining natural speech while playing metered rhythmic figures with one’s hands. For clarification, a sample of the score of To the Earth follows.

65 Smith, “Composing, Thoughts,” 244. 66 Steven Schick, The Percussionist’s Art: Same Bed, Different Dreams (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2006): 11.

Musical Example 4.1. Rzewski, To the Earth, mm. 6-2067

At the top of the score, Rzewski gives the instruction, “Words are spoken more or less with the music.”68 In addition, the piece is written in common time with duple beat divisions, placing the piece into subservience to meter. Even if the performer chooses to interpret the text flexibly, they must still somehow tie the words being spoken to the motions of the hands, giving the implication of a kind of melody-accompaniment texture rather than a completely unified musical whole.

This is shown in the patterns of rests in Musical Example 4.1., which insert breaks into the poetic line in addition to affecting the motion of the hands on the flowerpots. There is also a large break in the middle of a sentence between measure 11 and the pickup into measure 15. These breaks are unnatural not only for the performer attempting to play both parts, but also for the listener trying to follow the syntactic and grammatical structures they are hearing in order to understand the hymn.

Schick received some answers from Rzewski about this problem when the composer told him to foster a “flexible reading” of the text; however, paradoxically, he also asked for an interpretive dryness.69 This piece, though not rhythmically complex, thus turns into a power struggle between meter and meaning.

Other composers have encountered this struggle as well. Adam Silverman, in his 1999 work for speaking marimbist, stars cars bars, chooses to deal with the problem of stilted text delivery by

67 Frederic Rzewski, To the Earth (Brussels: Sound Pool Music, 1985). 68 Ibid., 1. 69 Schick, Percussionist’s Art, 10. 40 embracing the effect of meter on text. This piece requires a solo marimbist to deliver text from

Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita during the performance. Silverman writes, “I vividly remember getting the idea for [stars cars bars]…I had been reading Lolita for the thousandth time, mulling over that passage and found it would loop perfectly in a post-minimal fashion because of how the rhymes double back on each other.”70

The text that Silverman uses in this piece is taken directly from the novel; however this excerpt does not appear in the book as prose. Rather, it is a poem being recollected:

O my Carmen, my little Carmen! Something, something those something nights, And the stars, and the cars, and the bars, and the [barmen— And, O my charmin’, our dreadful fights. And the something town where so gaily, arm in Arm, we went, and our final row, And the gun I killed you with, O my Carmen, The gun I am holding now.71

The treatment of the text by Silverman is similar to Rzewski’s in some ways. The piece is very strictly metered, and each syllable of text is tied to a musical event. However, unlike Rzewski,

Silverman includes a separate musical staff to denote the rhythms of the texted events.

70 Adam Silverman, email message to author, January 28, 2015. 71 Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita (New York: Random House, 1997): 61-62. 41

Musical Example 4.2. Silverman, stars cars bars, mm. 82-9172

As can be seen in the musical figure, the text maintains some independence from the hands because it is written in the score as if it functions alone. However, because the piece is like

Rzewski’s To the Earth in its adherence to meter, a performer must overcome some of the same challenges in both pieces in order to deliver natural-sounding text.

Silverman escapes this problem by setting the text in a way that ignores rules of grammar and syntax. He takes small fragments of the poem and loops them. When the piece begins and the words

“the stars” are whispered repeatedly, it is possible that the audience reacts to hearing these words by associating them with imagery or meaning; however, after this fragment of text, along with a repeated pair of chords, is presented thirty-four times in a row, the words begin to lose their meaning and become, by association, part of the musical texture. In this way, Silverman demolishes any expectation of narrative, which he continues throughout the entire piece until the very end, where a complete phrase (“The gun I am holding now”) is presented in stark silence. This type of approach shows influence from the minimalist movement, and resembles Steve Reich’s pieces that are comprised of taped dialogue, even though Silverman’s piece is for a live performer.

72 Adam Silverman, stars cars bars (Swarthmore, PA: Adam B. Silverman Music Publishing, 1999). 42

Musical Example 4.3. Silverman, stars cars bars, mm. 1-34

These two pieces present two very different approaches to the problem of stilted text. On the part of Rzewski, in the attempt to accompany one’s speaking with metered percussion writing, there is struggle to realize a performance of To the Earth in an authentic way. On the part of Silverman, there is an absorption of text into musical material rather than interplay between the two lines. This provides the context for Smith’s early approaches to the problem.

Smith’s first published piece for percussion and text is Poems I II III, published in 1971. The piece is like To the Earth in its usage of a set of similar found percussion instruments: metal brake drums. However, Smith chooses to employ two performers, one to act as narrator and one to perform the notated brake drum music. In the score he notes that “balance between performers should be such that every word is audible, as well as every sound of the percussionist.”73

Even though Poems looks similar to both To the Earth and stars cars bars because of the division of the brake drum melodic material into strict metric time, Smith asks that a separate performer deliver the text on top of the music in order to maintain a narrative, syntactic structure for the listener while still retaining the rhythmic integrity of the written musical material. In this way the text is unaffected by what the percussionist’s hands are doing. Also, by choosing not to set the text in rhythm, he allows it to interact with the rhythmic and melodic lines of the brake drums through performer inflection, rather than be constrained by melody-accompaniment expectations.

73 Stuart Saunders Smith, Poems I II III (Somers, CT: Somers Music Publications, 1984), 1. 43

Musical Example 4.4. Smith, Poems I II III, First Movement mm. 14-2474

It must be noted that using a separate performer to deliver the text of Poems I II III is not a technique that Smith avoids completely in his subsequent pieces. In several other instances such as

Thinking About Anne Sexton (2000) for vibraphonist and speaker and Castine (2006) for solo marimbist and offstage speaker, Smith writes pieces that include words delivered by a performer who is separate from the percussionist. However, these two particular works are ones in which Smith has purposely not merged the two parts for purposes of staging. In Thinking About Anne Sexton, this is because the speaker is playacting as poet Anne Sexton; in Castine, the voice is intended to come from offstage. Smith uses these staging instructions as a dramatic element, making the text a separate entity from the instrumental performance. This also occurs in the “Bly” movement of The Authors, where Smith specifies that the speaker must be in the audience and belong to the opposite gender of the instrumentalist onstage.

Smith’s Rhythmic Language Revisited

Smith’s rhythms actively attempt to mimic human speech, as is stated previously in this document. This directly affects the way Smith’s musical works are notated. In an essay about words

74 Ibid., 1. 44 in music, Smith presents the text from the tenth movement of Some Household Words, shown in the following musical example.

Musical Example 4.1. Smith, Some Household Words, Movement X75

He then gives a rhythmic transcription of his own performance of these words and states that because of the nature of words (stresses and accents), the rhythms of speech tend not to vary much between the interpretations of different performers.

75Smith, “Stuart Saunders Smith,” 132. 45

Figure 4.5. Smith’s realization of the rhythm of Some Household Words, Movement X76

In looking at this transcription, it becomes clear that the words are chosen based on the rhythm that a native English speaker would naturally impose upon them when performing the piece, even if there is some imagery invoked for the listener upon hearing. Smith’s music is not rooted in traditional musical “language”, but by repurposing the meaning and the rhythm of language, he creates music that is conversational in nature. Speakers interpret his texts, which then take on a rhythmic and melodic quality in the development of their sounds or narratives. Then, if the texted work also contains instrumental elements, the performer places these in dialogue with the words.

These elements are intricately woven together.

In order to see Smith’s rhythmic language in action as it relates to text, his next significant texted percussion work after Poems is vital. This work, Songs I-IX for an actor/percussionist, was written in 1981. This work is scored for a table full of found objects such as a frying pan, a set of glass jars, and a bowl of water. For reference in the following discussion, a diagram and photo of this author’s set up for this work can be found in Figure 4.2.

76 Smith, “Stuart Saunders Smith,” 133.

Figure 4.2. Photograph and Diagram of Performer Set-Up for Songs I-IX

Because this piece is played by a single performer, Smith contends with the aforementioned problem of stilted text in a new way. He accomplishes this by avoiding periodicity in his rhythms altogether, both with standard notation and with more inventive notation. Standard musical notation in this piece is generally found in passages where the speaking voice is not active, as seen in the following musical example.

Musical Example 4.6. Smith, Songs I-IX, Excerpt from Song IX

This example shows a musical interlude that precedes the texted events of Song IX. As can be seen here, even though the rhythms are written in standard notation, an audience would be hard- pressed to transcribe exactly what these rhythms are – or even where the beats and beat divisions are 47 located – when listening to a performance. This comes as a contrast to the following example, which shows an excerpt from the same movement that utilizes non-standard notation.

Musical Example 4.7. Smith, Songs I-IX, Excerpt from Song IX

This section of the score for glass jars scraped and tapped with the blades of a pair of serrated steak knives is written in such a way that the performer’s interpretation of the text will determine the overall rhythm and duration of the notes contained in the section. The dotted lines indicate sounds that should correspond with each word, but if a performer changes the speed or emphasis in oration, the rhythm of the glass jar melody will change. This is a standard notational system that returns throughout Smith’s entire compositional timeline, even when he experiments with other forms of notation for specific pieces.

Scoring for Varied Sound Materials

Smith called Songs I-IX a surrealist opera for actor percussionist, and said that the choices of instruments were made in order to “find sounds that would timbrally fuse with and develop the sound of the various characters’ words.”77 Combining sound choice with Smith’s rhythmic language can also have a great effect on the interpretation of his works. Wendy Salkind writes about this in her discussion of approaching Smith’s works as an actress:

Linguistic imagery is often psychological in nature, and actors must learn to express language through their sensory knowledge of the world. They study language to know the emotional value of sounds. For example, actors learn that certain large, open vowels, such as AH, OH, OO, when spoken, resonate deep in the body. The physical sensation of speaking those sounds so that they resonate fully is subtly linked to a psychological experience. In voicing them, one feels large, powerful, sexual, vulnerable, and rooted in the chest, the belly, the

77 Welsh, The Music of Stuart Saunders Smith, 318. 48

groin. Obviously, not all words holding those vowels have meanings that parallel the sensations I have described. But the actor, like the singer, knows that a good writer/composer will expose the heightened emotions of a character through language whose sounds trigger the actor's psyche and allow the voice to wail, sigh, or sing.78

The text of Songs I-IX is speech-song throughout, meaning that, although the words chosen sometimes can create a picture in the mind of the listener, they generally do not make semantic sense.

In this instance, however, syntactical structure can be observed. Of more particular immediate interest in this discussion of integrating text with musical material is Smith’s choice of sound materials, which treats the found instruments on the same level of listening as the textual material, as can be seen in the following musical example.

Musical Example 4.8. Smith, Songs I-IX, Excerpt from Song II

The wiggling line underneath the words in this example indicates that with one hand the performer is shaking a milk jug filled with water. This is both a narrative choice and a timbral choice, since this movement begins with the words “a little stream” and the continuation of this sloshing water sound is the connecting thread that ties the second song together. The lines within the musical staff indicate that the performer should rub sandpaper with their otherwise unoccupied hand. The text in this portion is built heavily on usage of the sounds made by the letters S and F, which are sibilant vowels that give an illusion of hissing when used in quick succession. This quick succession is created with the tempo marking of “very fast”. This hissing is emulated in the hissing of the sandpaper pieces rubbing against each other, showing imitation and incorporation in the relationship between the two parts.

78 Wendy Salkind, “Language and Percussion: An Actor’s Perspective,” Ex Tempore 4, No. 2 (Spring/Summer 1987). 49

Upon seeing what Smith does with sound choice in pure speech-song, it is a logical next step to look at what he does when his text retains both syntactical and semantic sense. For this, it is useful to look at The Authors (2006). This piece is similar to Songs I-IX in that it is a dramatic work for a vocalizing instrumentalist. However, there are two large differences. First, this work is scored for marimba, which is a more homogeneous sound palette than the table full of disparate sounds used for

Songs. Second, this work does not use original poetry by Smith, instead featuring writings by twelve famous American authors.

In The Authors, Smith uses some of the scoring techniques seen in Songs. For instance, in the following musical example from the eighth movement, entitled “Chute”, Smith uses notation that implements dotted lines to connect words either to musical notes or the spaces between the notes. He also continues his practice of including floating notes underneath strings of words, which leaves the performer to make the specific decisions about how exactly the two elements will fit together. This particular movement is also like Songs I-IX because it uses a set of found instruments: a homemade marimba made out of pieces of wood. This scoring change is done because the narrator depicted in this movement is a child and the higher, less nuanced pitches of these pieces of wood better reflect this character.

Musical Example 4.9. Smith, The Authors, “Chute”79

The usage of dotted lines to connect words to corresponding notes or spaces is also especially prevalent in the second movement, which is entitled “Kerouac”. This movement contains text taken from Kerouac’s long narrative poem Old Angel Midnight, written over the span of 1956-59. A

79 Stuart Saunders Smith, The Authors (Sharon, VT: Smith Publications, 2013). 50 portion of the text Smith chooses for his score appears in Musical Example 4.10. I have also included some of my own markings in order to more easily discuss thematic material.

Musical Example 4.10. Smith, The Authors, “Kerouac”

The reasoning for Smith’s choosing of this particular text is very clear. First, there is a definite bent in these lines toward the development of a specific linguistic sound; the most obvious one in this excerpt is the continuous string of plosive letters (consonants that involve the stoppage of air such as P, D, or T), as seen in Smith’s quotation of the words “pones tics parts pans pools palls pails parturiencies and petty thieves”. However, unlike his instrumentation for Songs I-IX, Smith is using an instrument with a homogeneous timbre for much of the scoring of The Authors, so he cannot blend the words into the musical material by imitating them with various found sounds. Therefore, he imitates the repeated plosive sounds by introducing a returning motive, which can be found in brackets in the three places that it appears in the above musical example. Because the rhythms of the marimba material presented here are dependent on the performer’s reading of the text, Smith creates unity in the melodic line that will link it to the repetitive nature of the sounds of the words in the text.

As the text incorporates a larger variety of consonant and vowel sounds (and a regional accent) in the line that follows, the register displacement also becomes more varied with the addition of more and more single notes in an extremely high octave on the marimba while pitches from the theme continue to be interspersed throughout. At the beginning of this new text, there is also a statement of all of the notes from the previous theme, seen here in brackets. However, this time, the theme is presented with the notes happening in succession and none of them “stacked” into chords. 51

Musical Example 4.11. Smith, The Authors, “Kerouac”

With other movements of The Authors, Smith takes on new challenges in blending text with music by including passages that are in complete sentences and narrative in nature. Although Smith removes these words from their original context, he leaves their grammar relatively intact, requiring a different approach to musical scoring to integrate the marimba with the spoken voice. Because of this, this work is notable in the amount of singing that the performer is called upon to do. The first instance where this is especially prominent is in the third movement, entitled “Dickinson.”

Musical Example 4.12. Smith, The Authors, “Dickinson”

Smith uses two different kinds of notation for sung notes, which are both seen in the preceding musical example. The first is a circle drawn around a notehead to indicate that the performer should sing or hum that note and simultaneously strike the note on the marimba. The second is a square around the notehead, indicating that the performer should sing the note without striking it. In this particular movement, the usage of singing might also be an attempt by Smith to depict Emily Dickinson differently than he does some of the other authors used in the other 52 movements. Whether or not this is true, however, the usage of the singing voice and spoken voice in the same movement serves to blend the performer and instrument effectively together by giving the voice pitch material that interacts with what is presented on the instrument.

Music as Language

The interaction of text and music through notation, rhythm, and scoring brings up the question of whether it is possible to find proof in Smith’s music that instrumental music can be analyzed as language. Attempting to definitively attach linguistic labels to music to find direct parallels is a topic fraught with subjectivism and not an exact science. Many scholars have been inspired in particular by Noam Chomsky and his rules of generative grammar in the search to assign rules to the communicative and formal aspects of music. At its core, generative grammar is a set of rules that govern the structure of English sentences in order for easier comprehension of how the language itself works. These rules “tell us exactly what can be counted as a grammatical sentence of

English, while excluding everything that is not a sentence of English.”80 Other scholars were inspired by this search for rules in language to try to apply linguistic study to music to gain better understanding. One of the first of these scholars was Leonard Bernstein, in his lecture on The

Unanswered Question, in which he speaks about being inspired by Chomsky to create a musical grammar.81 This, in turn inspired many scholars to write works to discuss the merits (or lack thereof) of using linguistics in music analysis; among these is Jackendoff and Lerdahl’s A Generative Theory of Tonal Music. In the preface to this book, they write:

It is evident that a listener perceives music as more than a mere sequence of notes with different pitches and durations; one hears music in organized patterns. Each rule of musical grammar is intended to express a generalization about the organization that the listener

80 R.L. Trask and Bill Mayblin, Introducing Linguistics E-Book. (London: Icon Books, 2012): loc. 327. Kindle. 81 Bernstein, Leonard, The Unanswered Question: Six Talks at Harvard (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1976), 7-10. 53

attributes to the music he hears. The grammar is formulated in such a way as to permit the description of divergent intuitions about the organization of a piece.82

However, there are problems with a very strict set of grammar rules, the main one being that a system of that type is inflexible and more rule-based than human-based. (These same problems extend into music, where absolute music creates subjective meaning that is not interpreted in the same way by all listeners.) In response to this, Chomsky developed his rules into a system of transformational grammar, wherein the words in a sentence can be rearranged without changing the meaning of the sentence. About this he stated, “A language is an enormously involved system, and it is quite obvious that any attempt to present directly the set of grammatical phoneme sequences would lead to a grammar so complex that it would be practically useless.”83 Ironically, this system of transformational grammar allows for much of this problematic complexity and has resulted in linguists being faced with the idea that there is nothing impossible in human language and that they have no set identifying properties. This defeats the purpose of using this method of analysis at all.

Chomsky himself had to admit this and continue the search for a new analytical system.84

Music causes some of the same problems, especially post-tonal music. In the book Is

Language a Music, author David Lidov attempts to reconcile music and language, noting that both systems boast inflection, articulation, signs, and syntactical structures.85 These elements could be of use in a discussion of Smith’s music, but caution must be taken. Lidov has confined himself to discussion of music that is constructed within some a fixed system, be it formal, harmonic, or melodic. Smith’s melodies are often constructed intuitively, and his formal and rhythmic structures are almost always built to purposefully obscure repetition. Rather than look for direct parallels to the

82 R. Jackendoff and F. Lerdahl, A Generative Theory of Tonal Music (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1983): x. 83 Noam Chomsky, Syntactical Structures, 2nd edition (New York: Walter de Gruyter, 2002): 18. 84 Trask and Mayblin, Introducing Linguistics, loc. 344. 85 David Lidov, Is Language a Music?:Writings on Musical Forms and Signification (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005), 3-11.

54 study of linguistics, then, we must look for ways in which Smith’s music imitates language in creating unique systems of expression.

Levels of Text Abstraction as Expressive Element

Smith, in his efforts to create a flexible but universal musical “language” wherein text and instrumental music exist at the same importance level, confronts the issues of communicativeness in his music and works through them in different ways. One way that he presents text is in a traditional narrative form, as seen in pieces such as Lazarus or …And Points North. In this way, the material left to interpretation by a listener is largely in the instrumental part rather than in the text. However, even these texts are made abstract by the removal of context.

As previously stated, Smith sometimes presents words in a way that maintains the structure of language from a grammatical standpoint, but uses words that don’t make sense together.

Interestingly, Smith embraces the daunting prospect of a system where anything is possible, while linguists have shied away from it. This is especially true in pieces such as Tunnels, in which he takes words apart, developing the individual consonant and vowel sounds as musical tones. This produces systems which seem governed only by an attempt to use all of the tools at Smith’s disposal to create music: instrumental sounds, words, narrative constructs, and individual spoken sounds. Different levels of text abstraction are key in this pulling together of so many disparate elements.

Text abstraction in performance art is becoming common, according to Salzman and Desi in

The New Music Theater:

As the importance of linear narrative and character recede, the use of fragmented and nonlinear texts has gained ground. The issues of text become at once simpler and more complex. Found or documentary texts have been used as the basis for music-theater works, often without a conventional scenario. A typical strategy uses so-called macaronic texts, fragments from various languages, overlaid on one another like palimpsests.86

Within pieces, the level of abstraction is not universal, however. In By Language

86 Eric Salzman and Thomas Desi, The New Music Theater: Seeing the Voice, Hearing the Body (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 93. 55

Embellished, I, Smith includes lucid text (Prologue, Epilogue), speech-song using words in an order than makes syntactical sense, and speech-song using nonsensical phonemes.

Smith is not the only composer to combine different types of language within a piece this way. Georges Aperghis, in Le Corps à Corps, his 1978 work for speaking percussionist playing a zarb (a small goblet-shaped hand drum from Persia), uses two layers of textual abstraction. One layer is a series of syllables, which act as narrative sound effects to first introduce and then accompany or interrupt the second layer in counterpoint. This second layer is a story about a race, told in French, which is also dual in nature because it talks about both a horse-drawn chariot race and a modern day car race which end badly.87 This text is further abstracted when Aperghis uses processes of building the story by adding one word at a time. Some of these techniques include presenting the text in a rapid-fire manner, changing narrative point of view, and repeating phrases multiple times before proceeding with new material.

Musical Example 4.13. Aperghis, Le Corps à Corps, Excerpt from “Recit”88

87 Lee Wilkerson Hinkle, “Theatrical Music for Solo Percussion” (DMA diss., University of Maryland – College Park, 2010), 4. 88 Georges Aperghis, Le Corps à Corps (Paris: Editions Salabert, 1982). 56

Combining Disparate Elements into an Expressive System

Toucher, written by Vinko Globokar in 1973, is another example of a composer using a fixed system to synthesize music and text. The piece uses lines from a Berthold Brecht play translated into

French. The percussionist is asked to choose instruments that correspond to seven different vowel sounds. Whenever these sounds appear, the percussionist strikes the “linked” instrument.89 The expressive system is created using this close association between instrument and word. There is even a “key” presented in the first line of the score, where each instrument and its corresponding phoneme are given to the audience sequentially before the more complicated portion of the piece begins

(Musical Example 5.2). Gradually, throughout the piece, the percussion sounds begin to take the place of the words with which they are associated, which is done with the intent of turning them into a vocabulary that the audience can follow.90

89 Schick, Percussionist’s Art, 149-150. 90 Whiting, “The Speaking Percussionist as Storyteller,” 106-107. 57

Musical Example 4.14. Globokar, Toucher, opening gestures91

91 Vinko Globokar, Toucher (New York: C.F. Peters, 1978). 58

Another example of a piece that attempts to create a set system that applies to its text and instrumental elements is Dan Senn’s Peeping Tom. In this piece, for speaking snare drummer, the drum is played throughout the entire piece with text interspersed. However, when the text appears, the rhythm in the snare drum part is linked to it with a square in the score.

Musical Example 4.15. Senn, Peeping Tom, mm. 1-292

The logic of the opening is built by presenting the rhythms that appear without text as rhythms that appear with text later in the spoken first sentence, which is, “As a kid, I was rapt by one-way mirrors, not because I was a voyeur (though indeed I was), but because of an idea.” Figure

5.2 is an analysis of these themes with each one color coded every time it appears. In this figure, the places where the text actually appears along with its rhythmic theme are both color coded and surrounded with a bold outline.

92 Dan Senn, “Peeping Tom,” in The Noble Snare, Vol. 4, ed. Stuart Saunders Smith (Baltimore: Sonic Art Publications, 1988), 30-32. 59

Figure 4.3. Analysis of Peeping Tom Text and Rhythm Correlations

In Tunnels, Smith plays with the idea of a fixed language system in his exploration of the word “tunnels”. This score resembles a script rather than traditional notation, and instead of assigning the instrumental sounds to appear with the same syllables every time, they appear in interplay with Smith’s words (See Musical Example 2.1). This system allows for more freedom, because unlike the pieces by Aperghis and Senn, the rhythms of the hands and text are not tied together. However, Smith also explores this notation throughout pieces that are more intuitive in construction, like By Language Embellished, I. Generally, Smith’s texted music is more dependent on content than structure.

Language-Based Music: Easter in Bingham

In Smith’s scores that more closely resemble traditional musical notation, the interplay between instrumental sounds and text as a system of language is even more pronounced. For instance, Easter in Bingham, which was written in 2016, is a setting for speaking vibraphonist and offstage saxophone of a previously written speech-song entitled In Bingham. In Bingham evokes images of growing up in Maine and boasts frequent “orchestration changes” by fluctuating between a

“normal” speaking voice and a heavy Maine accent.93 These changes are indicated in the text with use of a bracket. There are also moments of silence punctuating sections of text, shown with the insertion of a period for each second of pause the performer should take after a line of text (Musical

Example 4.16).

Musical Example 4.16. Smith, In Bingham, fifth movement94

93 Welsh, The Music of Stuart Saunders Smith, 148. 94 Stuart Saunders Smith, In Bingham (Baltimore, MD: Smith Publications, 1992). 61

Easter in Bingham presents all seven of the original speech-songs of In Bingham in their original order, but combines them with newly-composed instrumental material. Figure 4.4 shows a

“road map” of the major sections in order to clarify how the piece is constructed.

Section 1: Section 2: Section 3: •Offstage Saxophonist •Vibraphonist performs •Saxophonist reprises performs solo texted section, opening solo, further •Vibraphonist stands combining seven speech- backstage onstage, listening. songs with instrumental •Vibraphonist material. simultaneously performs •Saxophonist plays new instrumental offstage tam-tam. material

Figure 4.4. Division of Easter in Bingham into three major sections

As we have previously seen, Smith’s musical language within major sections of a work tends to be aperiodic and largely based on melodic gestures rather than a larger form. This piece is no different, as can be seen in the following musical example, which is taken from the material presented by the saxophone in the opening bars of the piece (Musical Example 4.17).

Musical Example 4.17. Smith, Easter in Bingham, Opening of saxophone solo95

After the opening saxophone solo, the speaking vibraphonist begins the portion of the piece that includes the text. The first two times the text enters, it is performed alone, without any instrumental sounds. Both of these segments of text contain portions spoken in the heavy Maine accent, which is an orchestration choice that has carried over from the original source material for

95 Stuart Saunders Smith, Easter in Bingham (Sharon, VT: Unpublished manuscript, 2016). 62 this piece. Between iterations of text, there are interludes of vibraphone music, punctuated infrequently by the saxophonist hitting a tam-tam offstage.

As the texted portion of the piece unfolds, notation that links certain vibraphone gestures to words of the text appears, but because these notes do not have a specific rhythm assigned to them, they become part of the resultant rhythmic figures inherent in the text itself.

Musical Example 4.18. Smith, Easter in Bingham, Excerpt from fourth song

The effect of a dialogue in a musical language is solidified as the interval between musical interlude and texted portions of the piece becomes shorter and shorter. This creates the illusion of these parts interacting with each other, rather than alternating.

Musical Example 4.19. Smith, Easter in Bingham, Excerpt from fifth song

At the end of this middle portion of the piece, there is one more phrase of text without the vibraphone, which gives a feeling of an oration coming full-circle, even though the text is not a repeated text. 63

In resetting In Bingham to create Easter in Bingham, Smith makes many choices in order to entwine the instrumental material with text. Possibly the most striking is shown in the final section of the piece, where the saxophonist reprises their opening solo. At the same time, the vibraphonist begins to perform their own instrumental solo.

Musical Example 4.20. Smith, Easter in Bingham, Opening of vibraphone solo

The two performers are instructed to play their parts simultaneously, with the music not necessarily ending together.96 This is an example of Smith’s music of coexistence, and it creates a fluid dialogue between the two players. Because the parts are rhythmically intricate in and of themselves and they do not have to line up, this creates complex resultant rhythms. If Smith’s solo instrumental writing can be compared to speech, the closing section of Easter in Bingham can be compared to the ebb and flow of conversation, even as the vibraphonist’s part is conversational with itself in combining text and instrumental performance in the preceding section of the piece. It is an expressive system within an expressive system and shows a new approach by Smith in synthesizing other aspects of his compositional language into his text pieces.

96 Stuart Saunders Smith, letter to author, May 2016. 64

CHAPTER 5 – CONCLUSION

There is no perfection,

just finishing.97

Using new ideas of notation, orchestration, rhythm, and text abstraction, Stuart Saunders

Smith writes texted pieces that create expressive systems unique to each of his individual works.

Further, he is able to use text as a musical element and instrumental performance as a speech-like element. This is not surprising, given the interdisciplinary nature of his catalog and the plethora of musical styles that inspired his compositional approach.

In his works for spoken text and percussion in particular, Smith’s music owes much to the tradition of sound poetry that preceded it, even as it explores new ways to incorporate text as a musical element. His compositional style in these pieces is indicative both of a unique voice and also of experimental tendencies.

Although Stuart Saunders Smith is not the first composer to use text in his music, his status as a prolific living American composer indicates that his music should be compared and contrasted with the work of those who came before him and those who are his contemporaries. This study should also accompany analysis of his works independently of a comparative lens.

It is the hope of this author that this kind of contextual and analytical background can be undertaken by performers preparing realizations of Smith’s texted works to create more nuanced, educated performances. Further thought on the subject of these pieces could also be used to better understand the works of other composers not included in the scope of this research. Because he is an important living American composer, Smith’s works are a valuable body of work for the musical community.

97 Smith, “Composing, Thoughts,” 242. 65

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