Breaking the Fourth Wall
written by Doug Hertz
2019 GLFCAM Matt Marks Fellow, Cycle 10
“Not Art Song… Anything but Art Song.”
I was on the phone with Gabriela who had just informed me that I was accepted into the Academy and while this news surprised and excited me, my spirits were immediately tempered knowing that I might have to confront one of my greatest composer-fears and write for the human voice. Had I been familiar with the risk-embracing mentality that Gabriela nurtures at the Academy, perhaps I wouldn’t have been so shaken when she informed me that I would in fact be writing an Art Song. At the time, however, it felt like being sent on a fool’s errand. A combined lack of experience and familiarity with the repertoire swam together in convincing me that I had no business telling rather experienced vocalists how to use their instruments.
Until that point, I thought I had done a pretty fantastic job avoiding any projects that would lay bare my inability to write for voice. Presenting myself in this light, however, is not factually accurate, nor is it faithful to my musical upbringing. In fact, I came to composing by way of writing a dozen or so pop songs between the ages of about twelve to sixteen. And while I pray that these songs never see the light of day, I’m indebted to them for providing vehicles for some of my earliest lessons in creating in sound. My then piano teacher encouraged to write these songs down which eventually developed into composing for others. This led me to gravitate away from songwriting until my output of songs slowed and eventually stopped altogether.
Opportunities to write for voice occasionally presented themselves in the intervening years, but I had shied away for various, and perhaps irrational, reasons. Part of this has to do with taste: truthfully, I’m just not that attracted to certain strands of classical vocal technique. I find the wide and rapid vibrato associated with classical voice harsh and at odds with the more straight-toned vocal styles I’ve grown to love in rock and pop music. Furthermore, the fact that every vocalist has a unique instrument made composing for “the” voice feel like a moving target. As a composer, when you write for an instrumentalist, you expect more-or-less the same sound from two equally able musicians, but from one singer to another there is such a greater deal of variability. As a way of addressing this last challenge, I spent a great deal of time watching every video I could find of our two vocalists, Jessica Rivera and Matthew Worth, performing in an effort to internalize the unique timbres of their voices.
While the intention for this research was to better understand the mechanics of these two vocalists’ voices, I came away with a secondary yet far more significant insight into what my piece would become. Early on I encountered a brief yet striking video of Jessica singing “Am I In Your Light,” from John Adams’s opera, Doctor Atomic. I probably watched this clip 15 times. It’s stunning – I highly recommend you go watch it. Beyond its visceral beauty, I immediately felt an attraction to Adams’s musical language and sensibility towards vocal technique, providing a waypoint towards which my own vocal writing might aspire. More importantly, seeing Jessica so committedly going to bat for this music validated my own emergent tastes and connected me with a world that until that point had felt so alien. In light of my ignorant and admittedly reductive view towards the classical voice, it was an exceptional gift to have a window into Jessica’s mind and a stroke of luck that doing so revealed to me a path forward.
Even with this promising foothold, I was further stymied by writing for two vocalists. Concocting and communicating a nuanced duality between two singers provided not only additional technical challenges, but also suggested a more careful approach be taken to the “capital-D Drama” of the work. As comfortable as I’d grown with writing instrumental music, I was nervous to break the fourth wall and have the singers verbally communicating complex semantic meaning to an audience. During my research phase, I came across a video of Matthew Worth singing Schumann’s Dichterliebe. His performance was not just musically compelling, but dramatically so moving by virtue of the expressiveness on his face and in his voice. How could I create a score, which contained the secret sauce for appealing to this vocalist’s highly cultivated dramatic sensibilities?
I caught a break in my writing process when I had the idea to set to music the final letters exchanged between polar explorer Robert Falcon Scott and his wife Kathleen Scott before Robert’s death in pursuit of being the first person to reach the South Pole. As much as I doubted my ability to authentically and faithfully articulate such a tragic love story through music, I felt viscerally connected to the range of emotions the letters convey. I also found that their letters communicated vast psychological and geographical distances, which I felt compelled to reflect musically. This element of distance, shaded by shame, doubt, guilt, regret, provided a level of dramatic depth that presented some of the most fun compositional decision-making I’ve ever experienced. After clearing the hurdle of quieting my artistic doubts, I found relying on an external source (namely the text) for mood, pacing, and most importantly, form to be quite liberating. I believed in the text and I allowed myself to trust in my ideas just enough to jot down a few notes and the rest sort of fell out of my head and onto the page.
I came into my reading in Boonville as a Cycle 10 Fellow with a number questions zooming around my head and perhaps a less clear idea of how the thing was going to sound than I felt comfortable with. I was, however, confident in the playability and clear design of the piece, although this confidence presented more as insecurity about the simplicity of my own writing. I was able to easily justify this simplicity, though. After all, this was my first foray into a genre that I previously had all but sworn off and I was just testing the waters. We began the workshop by talking through a few small technicalities in the score that could be easily fixed, and then I spoke a bit about the backstory behind the text. I am often reluctant to say anything about my music’s inspiration during rehearsals, especially at the beginning, as I think it can box performers into certain modes of interpretation. I’m grateful that I decided to do this early with this work however, seeing as the gravity of the piece has everything to do with the context from which it comes. Jessica, Matthew, and pianist Molly Morkoski then read the piece from start to finish. After Jessica sang the final note, there were a few delicious moments of silence, and I could just tell that everyone in the room was moved (some to tears, I was later told).
I now believe that the piece’s ability to communicate so directly from this first reading actually has everything to do with the simplicity of the writing. Because the performers were able to easily read and perform the score right away, they could simultaneously tap into other facets of their artistry, namely their dramatic sensibilities. They intuitively understood what I was after, and further imbued the music with a wider range of emotions than I could have anticipated. And this emotion just built and built throughout the reading, as the three performers listened and responded to one another’s expressivity. In spite of my naïve approach to crafting drama, the performers brought their own experience to the collaborative experience, taking the piece to a place that I myself couldn’t have imagined.
There were a number of technical, practical, and artistic questions raised in the reading. It turned out that I had missed the mark on text setting in several places, had overcrowded certain registers from time to time, had not made the most economical use of my text, and had not given the piano part the attention that I do most of my instrumental music. And yet, the most profound takeaway from this hour-long session was this renewed sense of trust I felt in the collaborative relationship of composer and performer. I, like many composers, far too easily shoulder all of the responsibility of creating a new work. But if my experience at the Academy taught me anything, it’s that our jobs as composers only go so far and that at a certain point we can entrust performers to bring their own wisdom, vision, and creativity to this process. And with a bit of openness and generosity from both parties, this flow of knowledge can be a two-way street. I don’t know if I’ll ever entirely outgrow the intimidation I feel when presenting my work to an accomplished performer, but I’m beginning to better understand that we have everything to gain by sharing the joys, as well as the burdens, of the creative process.
Douglas Hertz (b. 1993) is a composer and percussionist based in Brooklyn, NY. Hertz uses sound as a medium to investigate experiences ranging from the personal to universal and from the physical to the spiritual. Learn more from Doug’s bio page.