Kitchen Door Blues - (2006) 

Tennessee Williams
for baritone and piano

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This text is under copyright and therefore not fully reproduced herein.

My old lady died of a common cold.

She smoked cigars and was ninety years old.

She was thin as paper with the ribs of a kite,

And she flew.....

[ 3 pages, circa 1' 55" ]

 

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Tennessee Williams

 

Williams is quoted as saying "that 'actual physical survival' and 'not competitive philosophies of art nor even political ideas' is the central 'problem' facing poets." ["Tennessee Williams's Poetry: Intertext and Metatext." Thomas Adler, p. 63, The Tennessee Williams Annual Review, 1998.] Certainly at the end of one's life, that sense of oncoming death and the surety of impermanence missing among youth is the central problem, handled here with a kind of abrasive humor. It is intentionally serious as well as comic.

 

Set in C minor with a formal twelve bar blues structure, I have chosen to repeat lines and portions of lines from the text to slightly extend the text itself. Against the underlying 6/8 meter in the accompaniment, the vocal line insists on a more square "four," the duple rhythm notated against the triple.

 

 

 

 

Also from Williams' In the Winter of Cities one finds the texts for my cycle for medium voice and piano, Blue Mountain Ballads, a far different and less introspective song cycle than this, as well as a more serious 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