Everyman - (2006)
Tennessee Williams
for soprano or mezzo soprano and piano
This text is under copyright and therefore not fully reproduced herein.
I went to the house of Everyman,
I found his woman there.
I asked her, Where is Everyman?
She said, His home is air.
I asked her, then, What is he like?
She said, No woman knows.
He moaned a little as he crept....
Tennessee Williams
Purdue's Thomas Adler cites Williams, "...Williams calls his poetry "a sort of spiritual witness...of an unattached and nomadic existence...." ["Tennessee Williams's Poetry: Intertext and Metatext," p. 63, The Tennessee Williams Annual Review, 1998.] This poem asks "woman" (typographically in lower case letters) questions about "Everyman," whom Williams captures in one image as a "savage bird" which escapes. Given his outlook of an "unattached and nomadic existence" and the oft-repeated reality that relationships break apart, this poem may almost be read in a circular fashion, for his generalities portray woman as sexual partner in one stanza and child being birthed in another later stanza. The story repeats itself, and the text speaks dramaturgically of this cycle from beginnings to endings.
Set in F minor and harmonized with many functional major-minor seventh chords to mimic a popular idiom, the song's general character is seen from the woman's perspective, for in reading the text many times, I came to find the replies to the questions the repository for the emotional content of the poem. Therefore this song setting is a "spiritual witness" from a woman's perspective of the nomadic, unattached ways of Everyman, whether child or lover.
The setting is with filled with a favored "blue note" chord form. Jazz musicians speak often of the sharp-9 chord, and yet the function of the major and minor thirds within functional harmonic progressions might be thought of as a flat-10 chord. The parallel use of these in the accompaniment sinks down over a functional secondary dominant seven chord pattern, to recall "blues" without employing the blues form itself.
Also from Williams' In the Winter of Cities one finds the texts for my cycle for soprano or mezzo soprano, Blue Mountain Ballads, a far different and less introspective song cycle than this, as well as a cycle for baritone and piano, From "In the Winter of Cities."
This score will be published in in Fifty-Five Songs, YR1550, in the coming months available from Yelton Rhodes Music, Los Angeles, California
