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The first piece on the program, Amy Beach’s Three Browning Songs, op. 44, speak to a collaboration-in-absentia; Beach was commissioned to write the works to commemorate poet Robert Browning’s birthday by the Browning Society of Boston. The first song of the set, “The Year’s at the Spring,” was written explicitly for this purpose with the other two songs later being dedicated to the Browning society and completing the set. This set has become some of Beach’s most popular and performed works. I term this a collaboration-in-absentia because Browning had died by this time but it seems to all who heard the songs, including Browning’s son, that Beach had uniquely captured the spirit of the poems. Even Beach’s recollection of the composition of these songs speaks to the importance of not just the text but the author to her process: “It was composed while traveling by train between New York and Boston … I simply sat still on the train, thinking of Browning’s poem and allowing it … to take possession of me.” The three songs — “The Year’s at the Spring,” “Ah, Love but a Day!” and “I Send my heart up to thee!” — reflect Beach’s early period style of art song composition, focusing on vocally dramatic lines, demanding much of the singer. This demand made the set, especially “The Year’s at Spring,” immediately popular with singers of the period and “Ah, Love, but a day!” being heralded as an American standard. This period also represented Beach’s engagement with poets and poetry that reflected her own background, using that as an impetus for composition. This type of collaboration shows a keen affection for the text and how the text works, something that is not always afforded to poets when their text is being set to music.

Much has been made about the relationship between Richard Wagner and the poet and author Mathilde Wesendonck; it is believed that the two had an affair, beginning when Wagner and his then wife Minna were taking up residence with Mathilde and her husband Otto after fleeing Dresden. Wagner denied the affair and kept Wesendonck’s name and connection to the songs private — she would not be known as the author of the text until after her death in 1902. But the poems were written form Wagner of a period of years, set by Wagner to music in 1857, now known as the Wesendonck Lieder. This collaboration is much different from the others present on this program; not just because of the romantic relationship shared between Wagner and Wesendonck but the way in which the relationship acted as a catalyst for both parties, almost with both acting as muses for each other. Notably, Wagner was also writing his opera Tristan und Isolde at this time, an opera that explicitly depicts and interrogates forbidden love, a reading that is complicated through Schopenhauerian philosophy. In situating the Wesendonck Lieder, initially titled Fünf Gedichte für eine Frauenstimme, with Tristan, we can better understand the former as a kind of collaborative work rather than just an outpouring of love from Mathilde to Wagner. In the score, Wagner calls both “Im Treibhaus” and “Träume” “Studie zu Tristan und Isolde” or studies to Tristan and Isolde, connecting this nascent musical ideas spurred on by Mathilde to this larger, more musically complex work. Their artistic collaboration stands in place of a possible physical relationship, enacting a Schopenhauerian renunciation of will and flesh, locating desire solely within both party’s creative outputs.

Melissa Dunphy’s “Come, My Tan-Faced Children,” presents more traditional collaborative work; the piece was written for and premiered by Bryce-Davis, written specifically for her voice. Dunphy notes that they “studied multiple recordings and crafted a composition to honor her essence,” a modern take on a common practice of composing works for a particular singer or instrumentalist. Dunphy takes the song’s text from Walt Whitman’s poem “Pioneers! O Pioneers!” first published in Leaves of Grass in 1865. Here, Dunphy’s act of collaboration transforms Whitman’s text by working directly with and writing for Bryce-Davis; a text initially written as an ode to those Americans moving across the country as a part of westward expansion is transmutated within Bryce-Davis’s voice and body. The positively understood manifest destiny of Whitman, echoed in the fourth line of the text, is erased or overshadowed. Here, the text becomes a call to action, not to civilize and urbanize, but to enact great change. By leaving out the line “Pioneers! O pioneers!” from the text, Dunphy shifts the energy of the text towards collective unity. Another set of works on the program written for Bryce-Davis are the two songs by composer and pianist Maria Thompson Corley. In an interview, Thompson Corley noted that “it is fun to write with a particular person’s voice in mind,” echoing Dunphy’s approach. Here, the collaboration exists between composer and performer; akin to the kind of transformation alluded to by Dunphy that takes place when Whitman’s text is placed within the mouth of a Black woman, Corley’s text in “The Beauty in my Blackness” exemplifies the positionality of both Corley and Bryce-Davis.

Two songs by Margaret Bonds and Florence Price highlight the nature of collaboration in a unique way, here between composer and poet. Unlike the more salacious relationship between Wagner and Wesendonck, here we see fruitful partnerships that also speak to part of the life of African-American artmaking in the twentieth century. Bonds discovered the work of poet Langston Hughes while a student at Northwestern University. It was this exposure, to a poem that she wrote “helped save me,” that led to the setting of Hughes’s text and a lifelong friendship and collaborative partnership between the two. When Hughes and Bonds finally met, Bonds exclaimed “we were like brother and sister, like blood relatives.” Hughes encouraged Bonds and when she moved to New York, he took her under his wing. Conversely, he sent words and text to Bonds for her to set. They worked together on musicals, popular songs, and art songs. Hughes sent her his collected book of poems, Fields of Wonder (1947), and it was a huge creative inspiration. She hoped to write a song cycle from the poems in this text and it is this collection that gives us the song on this program, “Birth.” The song, while short, is incredibly evocative, reminiscent of Strauss lieder, and tinged with richly-inflected chords. The vocal line and the right hand in the piano shimmers, bell-like, reflecting the words “Oh, fields of wonder, out of which stars are born, and moon and sun, and me as well.” In the February 1926 issue of The Crisis, a poem written by Louise Wallace began first with a note to readers: “Mrs. Florence B. Price, of Little Rock, Arkansas, has discovered a promising young poet in the person of Miss Louise Wallace of Fort Smith, Arkansas. Mrs. Price writes us: ‘There is no one close to encourage her. Her mother is dead. . . . She has never been to college for she’s been too busy sending all the other brothers and sisters there. This self-effacing girl shows ability, fineness of character, and generosity.’” This gives us some insight into at least the early stages of mentorship and collaboration between Price and Wallace. Wallace would go on to become a poet within the Harlem Renaissance, like Hughes, and would provide other text that Price would set in addition to “The Crescent Moon,” performed on this program. This is the second of three art songs in the set Three Short Songs, featuring another text by Wallace. Like “Birth,” “The Crescent Moon” is short yet evocative. The running arpeggios in the piano’s right hand gives the song a sparkling quality that highlights the twinkling nature of the text.

The last work on the program, songs from Peter Ashbourne’s set Fi Mi Love Have Lion Heart, were also written with a singer in mind: soprano Dawn-Marie Virtue-James. Ashbourne writes that she asked him to arrange these Jamaican folk songs, in which he avoided “making too many radical changes to the original melody, but everything else — harmony, form, style is a potential point of departure.” One thing to note about all of the pieces on this program is that they, in one way or another, reflect a very personal, even hyperlocal aspect of the composer, poet, singer, or some combination of all three. The Ashbourne may be the most explicit of all of the works as the source material are folk songs. “Banyan Tree,” originally called “Moonshine Tonight” in its folk song form, first states the melody plainly in both voice and piano before moving to what in the folk song is the chorus. Here, the piano part becomes more rhythmic and playful as the new text is allowed to dance, interweaved in the piano syncopations. “Fi Mi Love Have Lion Heart” is more plaintive in nature, as the singer confesses their everlasting love. The piano is sparse, allowing for the text to emote. The final song, “Nobody’s Business” is an almost rag, with stride-like playing in the piano. The song is playful and slightly discordant as a reminder to listeners that the song is a declaration for the singer to do what they like, as they please.

Imani Mosley is an Assistant Professor of musicology and music history at the University of Florida. In her work as a musicologist, cultural historian, and digital humanist and technologist, she focuses on the works of Benjamin Britten as well as music, opera, and modernism in Britain post-1945.