anyone lived in a pretty how town - (2007)
E. E. Cummings
for medium voice and piano
This text remains under copyright and are therefore not fully reproduced herein.
anyone lived in a pretty how town
(with up so floating many bells down)
spring summer autumn winter
he sang his didn't he danced his did.
Women and men(both little and small)
cared for anyone not at all
they sowed their isn't they reaped their same
....
[ 7 pages, circa 3' 30" ]
E. E. Cummings
From "The Rebellion of E. E. Cummings" by Adam Kirsch, in Harvard Magazine, March-April 2005, pp. 47-48, one reads, "With the rebellious enthusiasm of a true poetic 'son,' he elevated it to a moral and even a cosmic principle: his poems are constantly exhorting us to be original, independent, self-reliant. And he is scornful of everyone who takes refuge in received ideas and conventional standards -- all the cumbersome traditions that parents pass on to their children. This is the constantly repeated message of his poetry:
"i mean that the blond absence of any program / except last and always and first to live / makes unimportant what i and you believe; / not for philosophy does this rose give a damn...
"'So far as I am concerned,' Cummings once declared, 'poetry and every other art was and is and forever will be strictly and distinctly a question of individuality....Nobody else can be alive for you; nor can you be alive for anybody else.'"
When considering the making of art, the notion that anything other than one's own individuality is involved is perhaps clever, but does not get at the core fact that "doing" is an individual act expressing individual choices. Kirsch might call this "rebellious," but it is not so much rebellion as a simple expression of individuality in a world wherein the corporate seems to be pitted against the individual, society against the single and a mass culture against the solitary creative act.
Unavoidable is the fact that it is from the individual that the corporate, the society and the culture is made and advanced. This is so in science as well, wherein individual insights become discoveries to be verified and accepted. This is so in most of life, wherein the individual act directs the society. When this is turned upon its head, dictatorship and disaster results. Cummings was merely "rebellious" to the surrounding culture, intent on making him other than he decided he would become. Thankfully he won this battle.
The text is taken from Cummings' 50 Poems (New York: Duell, Sloan, and Pearce, 1940). It is number 29 in of the fifty. The nine four-line stanzas do not hold their "form," as the four seasons listed change line position as well as ordering, and the similar "sun moon stars rain" becomes other versions of itself, to develop the sense of time's passing. The story is of anyone living and dying, coming and going as the years progress.
I chose a gentle parody of popular American music to reflect this American expression of life's progress. As a result, the piano accompaniment should "swing," as notated in its 12/8 meter. The reliance on the standard popular music I-IV-V progressions is also tied to this genre and developed through the song setting.
For the style, the walking bass line with its lower neighbor, blue notes reflects the cultural roots of the language of the poem. Subtle twists, such as the three quarter length bass line under a standard duple gesture bend the popular genre in a "classic" direction. Yet the IV and V gestures are unabashedly a part of an Americana pop and blues tradition.
This score will be published in in Fifty-Five Songs, YR1550, in the coming months available from Yelton Rhodes Music, Los Angeles, California
