At the Party

AT THE PARTY (Text by W.H. Auden)
For Four Treble Voices

by Christopher Fulkerson

This piece came as an "einfall;" that's an old German expression for a musical idea more or less complete in the moment it occurrs; the Germans, bless them, actually have terms for the way composers' minds work. Here in America, when I tell someone I am a composer, they usually have a sense this means creativity is somehow involved, but they are often surprised to learn that it means someone who writes music. And of course - not infrequently! - my fellow Americans will argue with me about what the word "composer" means. Most of them are asses. Anyway, on a certain occasion I was sitting in a very important meeting at a retreat of the Girls Chorus, listening to its founder Elizabeth Appling, various consultants, and board members, talk about our Chorus's economics, using a presentation method later called Power Point; they were engaging in a conversation they didn't really want to involve the faculty in, or they would have paid us enough to be able to afford to work there. (On another occasion, when I tried to point this out, the woman who later became my boss read me the riot act for putting faculty salaries above glamorous facilities in importance. Her career was financed by her husband, whom it was crystal clear she used to bully into making more money whenever she needed more, so she could push the rest of us around in our poverty - there is no dignity for real artists in this country. At her first opportunity, she fired me, genuinely unable able to articulate a single reason for that action. Lacking funds to hire a lawyer, I had no recourse to the law, which in America exists only for the wealthy.) (Elizabeth backed my boss up, claiming I was fired because I had not taught the girls triplets; this was famously untrue, even the parents knew the familiar polyrhthmic exercize to the words "not difficult" that I had more than once taught the amassed choirs at camp in front of everybody; flabbergasted, I knew I could not succeed against the blind irrational will to be rid of me. Never let it be said that encouragement from my colleagues is the reason I write music. It is probable I will never meet those of my colleagues who may eventually make my music known, and it gives me no solace to think there may be hope in the future. "You never know" is the refrain of the species Americanus Ignoramus.) There I was, a mere presence, a token of myself, bored, my participation not really desired, with manuscript paper in my lap... when I got the idea that opens this piece, in a version that went on for some minutes. That original idea is not the one here, since, as soon as I began using that idea to set these words, the poem of course had its own requirements. The original einfall was intended as a choral study for the book VOCAL MUSICIANSHIP, which I wrote and used at the Chorus.

While some of it strikes me like the concatenations of Cedric Q. Milquetoaste, the archetypal sexless Brit in a wool suit who parts his hair down the middle, I like other of W.H. Auden's poetry very much, and have gratefully set some of his poems, notably in the short song cycle THE HIDDEN LAW LIKE LOVE for tenor and guitar. As is well known he writes more thoughtfully about music and specifically about composers than perhaps any other poet. I have found quite a few of his poems that I would like to set to music, but I reached a point where I had to cease, at least for a time, any involvement with his poetry, when I found that in his lyric The Composer, which I will not set, he claims "imaginary song" is "unable to claim an existence is wrong" and says to it that its nature is to "pour out your forgiveness like wine." I was uncomfortable about this line and had to give it some thought. I realized that I quite strongly disagree with this idea; in fact, and as the average no-nothing in the audience quite clearly understands, to decide in favor of one kind of music is to indict pretty much any other form. Only an intellectual can work themselves into the type of belief that Auden proposes. "The people" are usually offended by music that genuinely surprises them, in other words, they are not as forgiving as the composer Auden imagines. The imbalance here thus implies that a composer is some kind of martyr; a repellant notion. No work of mine is an act of forgiveness of the public, and I repudiate martyrdom. In fact I feel that the prerequisite to enjoying my music is an awareness that listening to music requires a dual involvement between the composer and the listener without which the challenge of the music automatically indicts the listener. For me, you either participate in the music, or you face the music.

The poem "At the Party," written in 1963, quirkily but effectively speaks to all these situations and issues, in a heavily ironic pattern of meanings about peope who do and do not listen to what they are saying. This piece was written in 1989 and is just two minutes long. It is dedicated to my friend Isabella Zagare.

Unrhymed, unrhythmical, the chatter goes:
Yet no one hears his own remarks as prose.

Beneath each topic tunelessly discussed
The ground-bass is reciprocal mistrust.

The names in fashion shuttling to and fro
Yield, when deciphered, messages of woe.

You cannot read me like an open book.
I'm more myself than you will ever look.
Will no one listen to my little song?
Perhaps I shan't be with you very long.

A howl for recognition, shrill with fear,
Shakes the jam-packed apartment, but each ear
Is listening to its hearing, so none hear.

The score is 12 pages long in the composer's fair hand. Hard copy of the score is $5.