September 23, 2022
Emerson Hall, Schwartz Center for Performing Arts, Atlanta, GA
Candler Concert Series
Susan Graham, mezzo-soprno; Music from Copland House (Carol Wincenc, flute; Benjamin Fingland, clarinet; Siwoo Kim, violin; Melissa Reardon, viola; Alexis Pia Gerlach, cello; Michael Boriskin, piano).
Richard DANIELPOUR/Rita DOVE: A Standing Witness
Mark Gresham | 27 SEP 2022
Dedicated on October 28, 1886, La Liberté éclairant le monde (“Liberty Enlightening the World”) stands tall on what is now known as Liberty Island in New York Harbor. The height from ground level to the tip of its torch is 305 ft 1 in tall, with barely over half of that (151 ft 1 in) being the height of the bronze statue itself. French sculptor Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi designed, and Gustave Eiffel built the metal framework for the modern colossus, colloquially known as The Statue of Liberty, or simply “Miss Liberty.”
But Miss Liberty was not the first figure to represent the American anima. Before her, there was Columbia.
As early as 1761, the name “Columbia” was used to designate English America as opposed to “Britannia.” But Columbia, as a semi-mythological, feminine personification of the United States, first appeared in the poetry of the African-American Phillis Wheatley in 1776, during the Revolutionary War, in her poem “To His Excellency George Washington”:
When Gallic powers Columbia’s fury found;
And so may you, whoever dares disgrace
The land of freedom’s heaven-defended race!
Fix’d are the eyes of nations on the scales,
For in their hopes Columbia’s arm prevails.
Throughout the 19th century, Columbia served as the goddess-like personification of the nation and liberty itself, akin to the British “Britannia,” the Italian “Italia turrita,” or the French “Marianne.” Even after the Statue of Liberty was finally nestled on what was then known as Bedloe’s Island, Lady Columbia remained the female counterpart of what became America’s male personification during the War of 1812, Uncle Sam. Americans perceived Miss Liberty as one aspect of Columbia. But soon after World War I, that began to change. By the Second World War, Columbia was all but forgotten except as the mascot for a particular motion picture company in Hollywood. Since then, Miss Liberty has reigned in the public mind.
L: Columbia, in a World War I poster by Paul Stahr. R: The State of Liberty. (Wikipedia)
It’s therefore intriguing to try to connect the dots between Wheatley and her depiction of Columbia to another African-American poet, former U.S. Poet Laureate Rita Dove, and her portrayal of Miss Liberty in texts for the evening-length song cycle A Standing Witness, set to music by composer Richard Danielpour.
A Standing Witness was performed this past Friday in Emerson Hall, at Emory University’s Schwartz Center for Performing Arts, by mezzo-soprano Susan Graham and Music from Copland House, the resident ensemble at Aaron Copland’s National Historic Landmark home in New York, now restored as a unique creative center for American music. It was the opening concert for the Schwartz Center’s 20th anniversary season and its 2022-23 Flora Glenn Candler Series.
Unlike Wheatley’s neoclassical, Olympian goddess-like Columbia, whose personification would become an active ideological force in leading the nation’s perceived destiny, Dove’s Liberty “identifies herself as a witness and nothing more,” according to the poet’s footnote to the Prologue. That this witness is finally “revealed” in the Epilogue as the Statue of Liberty (Danielpour’s program notes) is predictable to the point of cliché. In between are a dozen “testimonies,” one of which is an instrumental elegy. The rest set Dove’s politically-charged commentaries upon events and personalities in American history over the last half-century — specifically, selected events beginning with the 1968 assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy.
That the events witnessed here by Miss Liberty go back no farther is likely appropriate, as “the 60s” (by which we typically mean 1964 through 1973) were a watershed time of significant cultural change from the American affluence, confidence, and optimism that came post-WWII, despite a number of concurrent problems and social issues.
Not surprising that in 1973, Paul Simon released his song, “American Tune,” which would capture a more negative mood of many Americans during that era of social and political uncertainty. His Lyrics muse:
We’re traveling on
I wonder what went wrong
I can’t help it, I wonder what’s gone wrong
As with the works of any good artist, Dove’s highly symbolic poetic expressions come loaded with her own perspective on this history, including what’s important and what’s not, and her socio-political viewpoint, which is not shared universally among the American public by any means, especially in our current highly divisive times.
Unfortunately, they also evidently require interpretation, as the printed lyrics for each of the song cycle’s 12 Testimonies, plus the Prologue and Epilogue, come with a footnote briefly explaining what or who it is about.
Rita Dove. (source: University of Virginia)
Dove’s topics cover a spectrum: the assassinations of MLK and RFK, the Vietnam War, the social crises of 1968, Woodstock and Jimi Hendrix, military conscription and Muhammed Ali, Watergate and Richard Nixon, Roe v Wade, AIDS, the collapse of the Soviet Union, the emerging technopop consumer-culture of the 90s, the presidencies of Barak Obama and Donald Trump, the Black Lives Matter movement, and the COVID-19 pandemic.
Conspicuously, for the “Ninth Testimony” about 9/11 and the subsequent war in Iraq, Dove offers no words at all; it is an instrumental elegy.
But for the rest of the cycle, much like James Baldwin’s words in Joel Thompson’s To Awaken the Sleeper (performed by the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra the previous night, with the composer narrating), Dove’s poetry might actually fare better without the music, simply spoken.
That is not to fault Danielpour’s well-crafted musical settings with their colorful scoring, rich harmonic language, and occasional adaptations of American vernacular idioms within the context of his personal musical style. It is far more challenging to set excellent poetry to music than to set doggerel.
Richard Danielpour (credit: Timothy Greenfield-Sanders)
Nor does that detract from the superb performance by the golden-voiced Graham and the fully-collaborative participation of the excellent Copland House ensemble, which, as it should in chamber music, went well beyond mere accompaniment.
At the same time, poetic sophistication does not necessarily find itself meaningfully amplified by a musical setting, which is my perception of the case here. There is also the fact that the poetic messages definitively fall on one side of the American political spectrum. There is no fence-sitting, and at least half of the populace is likely to take a contrary viewpoint to some of Dove’s assertions. That is most obvious in the high praise for President Obama and the disparaging take on President Trump, those two polarizing presidents representing the most brightly-marked political dividing line of America’s last two decades. (Worth noting that many on the political right consider the Biden administration to be Obama’s third term, so that assertion still rings true.)
These things taken together make A Standing Witness most likely destined to be not only a “period piece” in the long run but also not universally representative of the half-century of American history it addresses either; instead, a view of the room through one keyhole, through one set of tinted glasses. It is also true that public perception of a history can also change dramatically with time, influences, and intervening events. Those of us who have lived through the entire era can stand as witnesses to that. ■
EXTERNAL LINKS:
- Richard Danielpour: richard-danielpour.com
- Rita Dove: english.as.virginia.edu/people/profile/rfd4b
- Music from Copland House: coplandhouse.org/music-from-copland-house
- Schwartz Center for Performing Arts: schwartz.emory.edu
Mark Gresham is publisher and principal writer of EarRelevant. he began writing as a music journalist over 30 years ago, but has been a composer of music much longer than that. He was the winner of an ASCAP/Deems Taylor Award for music journalism in 2003.
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