Exhilaration - dickinson and Yeats songs

all music composed by Gregg Kallor

Exhilaration — Dickinson and Yeats Songs is the premiere recording of Kallor's acclaimed song-cycles of poems by Emily Dickinson and William Butler Yeats, sung by mezzo-soprano Adriana Zabala. The album also features Kallor's setting of Christina Rossetti's poem "Song," and a "Lullaby" with lyrics by GRAMMY®-winner Herschel Garfein.

“MY BUSINESS IS TO SING!” Emily Dickinson once wrote; what she sings of is the exhilaration of being alive.

In It bloomed and dropt, Dickinson mourns the loss of a single “noon,” a metaphor for “the instantaneous, arrested present… when all accident, or ‘grossness,’ is discarded and there is nothing but essence.”* It isn't the passage of time that she regrets, but the lost opportunity to inhale more deeply the intoxicating ether of experience. For the poet who “would eat evanescence slowly,” the moment is everything.

And it is the moment to which she so compellingly calls our attention — the rapture of those first precious moments of spring, the frenzied urge of sexual yearning, the anguish of watching a beloved die. She illuminates these fleeting sensations with exquisite nuance, urging us to savor them before they vanish forever.

“Let Emily sing for you because she cannot pray,” she wrote to her grieving cousins after their father died. A poem, for her, was no mere abstraction, but a vital force — a prayer, a comfort, an inspiration. She felt impelled to let others hear the “noiseless noise in the Orchard” and her poems incite us to seek that noise — that essence — ourselves. “Exhilaration,” she tells us, “is within.”

William Butler Yeats’ lilting rhythms and gorgeous language — the very sounds of his words — are captivating, but it’s the immediacy of his poems that I find so moving. He navigates fluidly between towering pride and self-effacement — shouting, whispering, cajoling, imploring, and enthralling with a storyteller’s magic. One of the things I love about Yeats is that he’s so confident and bold in one poem, and then so completely vulnerable in the next.

Yeats rhapsodizes with sublime arrogance about the moment of creative inspiration in Ribh In Ecstasy, likening his creative prowess to the earth-shattering orgy of gods spawning new gods. Then, as suddenly as it comes, the moment passes, and he leaves us in literary post-coital bliss.

In He wishes for the Cloths of Heaven, Yeats gives us an exquisitely tender expression of love that breaks my heart every time I read it: “I have spread my dreams under your feet; / Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.”

Christina Rossetti’s Song is a love letter at life’s end; Lullaby is a musical kiss to a life just beginning. Perhaps these moments are not so dissimilar — stripped, as they are, of everything but essence. There is no fear or regret in Song, only words of comfort for the one who remains. For the one who just arrived, Herschel Garfein’s beautiful lyrics to Lullaby are a celebration of love and life and the promise of tomorrow.

Emily Dickinson once asked, “Do I paint it natural?” I have tried to preserve, as much as possible, the unique voices of these extraordinary poets. I hope these songs paint it natural.

—Gregg Kallor

© 2008 by Gregg Kallor. All rights reserved.

* from Richard Sewall’s excellent biography, “The Life of Emily Dickinson” (Harvard University Press, 2003)

Jan Swafford

author of "Johannes Brahms: A Biography" and "Charles Ives: A Life With Music"

"Gregg Kallor is a splendid writer of songs. You find in his Yeats and Dickinson settings the virtues you look for in songs new or old but rarely find in such abundance: a fine-tuned ear, able writing for the voice, great imagination in piano color and texture, and steady sensitivity to the poetry. Most impressive of all, to my ears anyway, Kallor writes songs in which the voice part is the prime focus, partly because he is a true melodist (a rare quality always, more so in the last fifty years), equally because the vocal lines are distinctive and expressive and closely knit to the harmony. Sensitivity, subtlety, and consistency--these are his kind of qualities, and they’re ones we need. So is beauty, and when you’ve heard Kallor’s songs that’s generally the first word that comes to mind."

Steve Staruch, Minnesota Public Radio

"There's something very natural about these pieces - I got the impression that the music that's on the disc has always existed."

The Emily Dickinson International Society

"Anyone lucky enough to experience a Kallor-Zabala performance leaves the classroom or the concert hall with a newfound or renewed love of poetry."