Where's Madge then, - (2007)
E. E. Cummings
for medium voice and piano
This text remains under copyright and are therefore not fully reproduced herein.
Where's Madge then,
Madge and her men?
buried with
Alice in her hair,
(but if you ask the rain
he'll not tell where.)
beauty makes terms
with time and his worms,
....
[ 3 pages, circa 2' 00" ]
E. E. Cummings
From XLI Poems (1925), this is yet another of Cummings' musings on beauty and death, wherein he seems to suggest the artist's awareness of an individual's worth, a worth which "the flower that sways in the autumn" cannot guess. Given Cummings' allegiance to individuality, this seems a wholly consistent philosophy, for the individual has clear "worth" to another individual, though not necessarily to the state, a society or "the masses."
The negative expression of this can be seen in Cummings' poem, "i sing of olaf glad and big," in which the individual refuses to bend to a hierarchy and is punished for that resistance. Wonderfully, one sees the same encouragement urged on us by Walt Whitman, in his "To the States."
The setting's original key is intended for a medium voice. The distinction between the hard, dotted rhythm (the Scotch "snap" of the right hand against the more normative dotted rhythm of the left) and the occasional triplet and intermittent chromaticism breaks the genre apart from a popular "Americana" feeling, and more forcefully makes an edge to this parade of questions.
Cummings reminds us that worth is inextricably tied up with mortality in his whimsical turn of phrase, "time and worms."
A standard song form has its center section, and this fulcrum to such a short section saps the rhythmic pulse from the setting, in a somber musing of wherein the answer to the question of life might be found. Cummings says "but i know." So we must, for there is no other ultimate source for an answer except through ourselves.
This score will be published in in Fifty-Five Songs, YR1550, in the coming months available from Yelton Rhodes Music, Los Angeles, California
