Program Notes

Patchen Songs was not only the first of many song cycles and sets I would write, but it is also my earliest piece that I still want performed.

In the Fall of 1974, I began to study composition with Alden Ashorth and, a bit later and simultaneously, with Paul Reale. Alden plied me continuously with songs, neither of us realizing then what fertile ground my mind was for everything about songs. I listened to songs from all eras and in all styles, sung and played by his favorite performers, and he assigned me various composition exercises to prepare me for writing my own. At the same time, he had me reading lots of poetry. A favorite poet of his was Kenneth Patchen, whom he had met and long admired, and he encouraged me to set some of Patchen’s poetry. The snow is deep on the ground was the first poem of his I set. Completed in August of 1975, it became the last song in the cycle, and over the next seven months, I composed the other seven songs.

At heart, these are love songs. They trace an arc of light, beginning in a song of pure love for another, gradually moving into darkness—in fact, the absence of light and love in the form of war and other horrors that humans visit up each other—and back to light: the cycle ends with a song about the transcendence of love—the love for another person, as well as the spiritual love present in our daily lives.

A note on the texts: Alden owned the first editions of all of Patchen’s books, and it was those from which I took the poems I set. Imagine my surprise many years later when I reread the poems from Patchen’s Collected Poems and found some differences. Evidently, he made some revisions when his publisher gave him the opportunity to compile a collected-works edition.

Patchen Songs was commissioned by my uncle and aunt, Gordon & Dorothy Carlson, their excuse for the commission being to help celebrate the United States Bicentennial. It was premiered by Milton Friesen, the baritone for whom I wrote the cycle, and Paul Reale, on a graduate student composer’s concert in Schoenberg Auditorium in May of 1976, a concert which, as it turns out, was part of a series at UCLA celebrating the Bicentennial.