the sky was - (2006)
E. E. Cummings
for medium high voice and piano
the
sky
was
can dy lu
minous
edible
spry
pinks shy
lemons
greens coo l choc
olate
s.
un der,
a lo
co
mo
tive s pout
ing
vi
o
lets
from Tulips and Chimneys (1923)
[ 2 pages, 1'35 ]
E. E. Cummings
The setting is one simple long arch, a lengthy and very tonal harmonic stroll across all the easy polytonal consonances of the diatonic scale, in which all "candy luminous" colors might still be found. How nice to think that, after so many decades of the "liberation of tonality," the freedom to employ it unabashedly remains the most normative musical language throughout popular music.
One wonders why "twelve-tone" schools and techniques did not also explore "eleven-tone" palettes, or "five-tone" palettes, especially as those who experimented with and labored in the fields of all twelve, chromatic notes appearing always together in rows, inverted and turned backwards, took it as a matter of faith and catechism that all twelve must be somehow "liberated." From what? Musical meaning? The musical sky is indeed "candy luminous," but especially on a clear day when the storms have passed. That might well summarize modern classical music's lost amblings of the last decades, wherein the "new" was always meant to supplant the old, rather than stand alongside it, and where complexity became mere clutter, dynamics mere noise and simple notions absent, in favor of obfuscation.
Music need not be either numbingly complex nor minimal, but rather simply -- well -- musical.
Cummings has shown another way, and music has much to learn from him -- modern yet human, odd yet conversant, kitsch yet never kitsch, and certainly a man who found his own voice in a sea of similarities and dogmatic adherence to the vagaries of "aesthetic" elite.
The harmonic scheme is extraordinarily simple, an upward parallel motion of diatonic chords, which would otherwise be called polytonal outside the framework of the simple major scale. In closed and open voicing, they make up the whole of the accompaniment.
This score will be published in in Fifty-Five Songs, YR1550, in the coming months available from Yelton Rhodes Music, Los Angeles, California
