Getty’s compositions, which are published by Rork Music and distributed by Theodore Presser Company, mostly involve the voice. His Victorian Scenes (1989) and Annabel Lee (1990) are choral settings - with orchestra or piano - of poems by Tennyson, Housman, and (in the latter work) Poe. Both were premiered by the Los Angeles Master Chorale and Sinfonia at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. The San Francisco Symphony and Chorus performed Annabel Lee in both 1998 and 2004, conducted on those occasions by Michael Tilson Thomas: the latter concerts also included Getty’s Young America (2001), a cycle of six movements for chorus and orchestra to texts by the composer and by Stephen Vincent Benét, and those concert performances formed the basis for the corresponding tracks of this recording. The Three Welsh Songs (1998) were born of a desire “to find the right tone” in his personal response to it.
-James Keller, program notes for Young America, 2004
COMPOSER'S NOTES
YOUNG AMERICA
Stephen Vincent Benet has given more than the closing quatrain to Young America. “Hark the Homeland” is modeled on the opening pages of John Brown’s Body, and is my homage to this neglected master. I wrote the text of “Heather Mary” on safari five years ago, and of “Daughter of Asheville” and “Hark the Homeland” a few months later. “My Uncle’s House” goes back to my college days. I began writing the music for all but “Daughter of Asheville” a few days before the September 11 atrocities, and finished within three weeks while also putting in full days at the office. Busy times.
Poetry is meant to be cryptic. If you understand everything, I have failed. “Heather Mary” is the best I can do. Where that song is a poem set to music, “Daughter of Asheville” is a lyric set to a tune I thought up years before. Both the words and the music of the latter are meant to sound as if they might have come from the Civil War. What can we guess of Janet Alicia and her dancing partner? I think he is telling us that he died in the Battle of the Wilderness, with her name on his lips. I would conjecture that she died generations later, in a world of motorcars and relativity, surrounded by their children and grandchildren and great grandchildren, with his ring on her finger. Now they dance, with the merry and brave, seeing only each other, into a dawn past reach.
Benet’s great miniature reverses the time line, and takes us back to the forest primeval in which “Hark the Homeland” began. What an ear! The unexpected spondee in “all lost wild America,” and the warmth and wit of the whole, make the piece a prize in any company. All a composer need do with such a text is to get out of its way.
THREE WELSH SONGS
I am the world’s worst singer, unless your hat is in the ring. I always wanted to sing “All Through the Night,” and bought an anthology including it. The English translation given there may have been faithful to the Welsh, for all I know, but was pretty clumsy after the first four lines. The arrangement was plain, with a nice use of parallel thirds and sixths in lines four and five. I kept the four good lines and the parallel thirds and sixths, and the glorious tune itself, and otherwise started from scratch.
“Welcome Robin” and “Kind Old Man” were in the same anthology, again with simple accompaniments. “Welcome Robin” already had a charming text, and needed only more harmony and counterpoint. “Kind Old Man” is a wonderful nonsense song, alternating between doleful and lively refrains. I added still more nonsense to the words, and hammed up the slow parts with barbershop melisma and melodrama. Keep the text in front of you, since I have asked the singers to take the fast parts presto possibile.
“All Through the Night,” of course, is the closer. I intended the text as a lyric, with a common touch, rather than a stand-alone poem. I chose hymn-like harmonies, more or less inevitably, but added a counter-melody in broken chords to bring out the bardic potential.
ANNABEL LEE
By all accounts, Poe’s marriage was serene. But his wife-cousin bore the lung disease that had killed his mother when he was two. By the spring of 1846 her condition was dangerous. A neighbor at that time happened to see Poe in a cherry tree, tossing the fruit down to Virginia. She was laughing as she caught them in her lap. All at once blood came from her lips. Poe leapt down and carried her into the house.
In January 1847 Virginia Clemm Poe died of tuberculosis. Like Poe’s mother, she was twenty-four. They had been married over ten years. She was buried near their home in Fordham. A friend reported “Many times...was he found at the dead hour of a winter night, sitting beside her tomb almost frozen in the snow...” Annabel Lee was finished by mid-1849. Poe’s own death at forty followed within the year.
The poem is a unique challenge. Critics will not need their spectacles to find its faults of taste. But any who are not moved by it might as well give up reading poetry, or at least romantic poetry. It invites us to re-examine our prejudices against sentimentality. It puts us through the wringer, like it or not. Mawkish and melodramatic, towering and harrowing, it will not leave us in peace.
Each of us recognizes the kingdom by the sea, where the angels cannot be trusted. We knew it before we knew any other world, the world of first helplessness, first beauty, a homeland older than memory. We cannot return without pain. And each of us recalls something of ourselves in the haunted innocent who the gods, out of mercy, had made mad.
VICTORIAN SCENES
The six choruses collected here were begun as separate a cappella works. “All Along the Valley” was published in this form in 1959, and the rest in 1982 and 1983. Accompaniments were an afterthought, evolving bit by bit from discreet pitch cues to full melodic partners with lives of their own. In source and spirit, all six are campfire songs. So it shouldn’t seem surprising that all the poems are resonant of nature, and that they were chosen from an age when “natural philosophy” and melancholy were the special genius of English verse.
We Northerners are not so long accustomed to cities as our Mediterranean cousins. In the end we would rather trust the forests and mountains, the sea and stars. And it was never more so when Victorians made a gallant stand against the skepticism inherent in their own science. The two generations that separate our poets are proof of the persistence and compass of the vision that unites them.
JERUSALEM (from PLUMP JACK)
Plump Jack is about the opposite trajectories of Hal and Falstaff in the Henriad. The text is by Shakespeare as far as I could make it, with some additions by me to stitch together the parts that I chose. The “Jerusalem” scene shows Henry IV’s collapse after hearing the news of his victory over the Percys . Hal enters in time to be reconciled with his dying father.