56
O Breath
music by Elliott Carter
words by Elizabeth Bishop
‘O BREATH’ IS A SONG of great complexity but also great intimacy – the singer counts the hairs on the breast of her sleeping lover (nine in total, ‘four round one // five the other nipple’).
In 1975, after almost thirty years of writing purely instrumental music, the American composer Elliott Carter (1908–2012) returned to word-setting with six poems by Elizabeth Bishop. A Mirror on Which to Dwell, the resulting cycle of songs, is particularly interesting in hindsight. Carter followed it up with a big piece to a poem by John Ashbery and another to six poems of Robert Lowell. Bishop, Ashbery and Lowell were all themselves American and Carter’s contemporaries, and by the time the composer had finished his Lowell cycle in 1981, these three vocal works were regarded by his admirers as harbingers of a lyrical late style. Carter was seventy-three.
But the songs weren’t that late, it turned out. Carter still had another thirty years of composing ahead of him (he died just before his 104th birthday), including musical settings of words by Ashbery (again), E.E. Cummings, T.S. Eliot, John Hollander, Marianne Moore, Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens (twice), William Carlos Williams and Louis Zukofsky – a who’s who of American modernist poetry.
What had kept the composer from writing vocal music for three decades was the complexity of his music. The rhythmic, textural and harmonic richness of works such as the Concerto for Orchestra (1969), the third string quartet (1971), and the Duo for violin and piano (1973) made them fiendishly difficult to pull off. In early performances of the quartet, for example, the four players had required earpieces carrying individual click tracks – electronic pulses – just to keep the show on the road. The composer doubted that singers existed who could do justice to his way of writing, but A Mirror on Which to Dwell proved him wrong.
It’s interesting that Carter should have returned to songwriting with Bishop. There’s a certain domesticity about her poetry. Comparing her to Chekhov, the English poet and critic Craig Raine pointed out that Bishop examined life ‘even in extremity, with the calm and precision of a gifted family doctor’. This chimes with the way in which Carter sometimes spoke of his chamber music in terms of domestic scenes, the players participants in a conversation. He certainly saw his string quartets in this way, comparing them to the ensembles in Mozart’s operas, where a number of characters will sing simultaneously, while expressing different points of view and exposing their individual personalities. There’s something of this instrumental roleplay in A Mirror on Which to Dwell, which, in addition to a soprano voice, is scored for a little chamber orchestra of nine instruments, and it is hard not to feel that Carter is using Bishop’s poetry to make sense of his typical musical concerns, verbal explanations for the way his music behaves.
In ‘O Breath’, the last of the six Bishop poems in the cycle, the poet is in bed with her sleeping lover. The ensemble uses mellow instruments in low lying ranges – the flautist plays an alto flute, the oboist a cor anglais, the clarinettist a bass clarinet; the violin barely gets out of its first octave and the other strings play in a similar range. Texturally, they form a bed of sound beneath the singer.
The rhythmic structure of the ensemble music is detailed and complex. The players execute a three-part polyrhythm the component parts of which begin every forty-third semiquaver, every thirty-seventh quintuplet semiquaver and every sixty-fifth triplet semiquaver. You are not meant to discern this – no one could discern it with their ears, because it is too complex and also too slow – but you are aware of a semi-regular rising and falling of gentle chords. So a technique that is pure Carter, and which might form part of any of his musical structures, here gains a rationale from the text, which describes someone sleeping. The words have explained the music.
The first words we hear are not from the body of Bishop’s poem, but are her title, ‘O Breath’, sung melismatically, over and over. It’s a gentle outpouring of notes akin to the call of a songbird, which the composer instructs the singer to perform ‘as if out of breath’. In the context of the whole cycle, the melismas are a noteworthy moment. In these songs, as in all his late vocal music, Carter’s vocal writing tended to be syllabic – one note per syllable – but here there are as many as ten. Following this opening, the syllabic style returns, the words sung dispassionately, almost as though the singer herself is falling asleep.
Bishop’s text is regretful. As she watches the rising and falling of the ‘celebrated breast’ of her sleeping lover, the poet realises her own separateness.
Equivocal, but what we have in common’s bound to be there,
whatever we must own equivalents for,
something that maybe I could bargain with
and make a separate peace beneath
within if never with.
The poems that Carter chose are more or less autobiographical – all Bishop’s poems were – and in ‘O Breath’ the poet seems to be especially aware of being a poet. Those caesuras – those midline breaks – belong to Bishop’s great poet-predecessor Emily Dickinson, and this poem was the only time Bishop used them.
Carter’s cycle is itself also self-referential. He makes use of a solo oboe (the composer’s own instrument) in the earlier song ‘Sandpiper’ – the bird in question is a metaphor for Bishop – and, like the poet, he doffs his cap to an illustrious composer of the recent past: surely that’s Charles Ives’s marching band in the fifth song, ‘View of the Capitol from the Library of Congress’! But in all these songs, Carter seems to be saying, via Bishop: these are some of the things my music is about.
In ‘O Breath’ the relationship between the poet/singer and her sleeping lover is characterised by pitch. Or, to put it perhaps more correctly, one of Carter’s typical pitch devices is explained by the poem. In the instrumental role-play of his chamber music – and even in big works such as the Concerto for Orchestra – Carter frequently allocated different intervals to different players or sections of an orchestra. It was a way of emphasising their individuality within the complex whole. In ‘O Breath’, the chamber orchestra is restricted to perfect fourths and minor sevenths, while the soprano voice never sings those intervals, but takes up all the others – so while the two might strike a musical ‘bargain’, ‘a separate peace’, they remain ‘never with’ each other. And by the time the last word of the song – of the whole cycle – comes around, the orchestra has already finished, the singer left as alone as the poet feels in that bed.
Elizabeth Bishop disliked what Carter did to her words, writing to a friend that she hoped, at least, there might be some good publicity in it. But she was hardly the first writer to object to a composer’s music. A.E. Housman had loathed On Wenlock Edge, Vaughan Williams’s song cycle to poems from A Shropshire Lad (he seems to have disliked all musical settings of his words); and Henrik Ibsen was unhappy with Grieg’s music for Peer Gynt. When, on the strength of his famous score, Grieg’s name was proposed to the playwright for another project, Ibsen is said to have scoffed: ‘You thought that was good, did you?’
A composer asks a poet’s permission to use her words. After that, the matter is out of the poet’s hands. Of course, like the poet in ‘O Breath’, the poem itself continues to have a separate existence on the page, and even within the song, the words ‘beneath // within / if never’ quite ‘with’ the music.