On Setting Texts

Recently, as I have been working on my latest piece, a Biblical oratorio for unmixed voices and four antiphonal Balinese Gamelan ensembles (the provisional title is Oombayahamanasqotsi, which is a composite word I derived from several native languages of the aforementioned island -- the meaning of which I will leave for any competent linguist to decipher), I have been forced to grapple with one of music's most challenging elements: text-setting.

Simply writing music to fit a text is fairly trivial, of course, but I expect more of myself than a mere illustration or accompaniment to the words of some other individual -- in this case, King David, or as biblical historians now generally acknowledge, some underpaid hack that was forced to ghostwrite psalms for him while he carried on with vulnerable foreign immigrants' women.

King David had better things to do than write poetry

The real problem, then, emerges after I've completed a sketch or draft and am forced to confront the enormous gulf in quality between the words I have set and the music I have set them to.  The last thing I want is for the listener to be distracted by some asinine poem or meandering libretto from the remarkable musical achievement surrounding it.  Trying to get a decent text can be a daunting task. For example, in my 1952 opera "Das Leben in der Stadt Sandelwood," I attempted to collaborate with Bertold Brecht via mail correspondence; it was only years later that I discovered the mysterious black spaces that peppered his letters were actually the work of East German censors and not a cue for me to have the singers hold out long, sustained yowls.  I would have appreciated it if he had told me that he was being redacted.

Thanks for nothing, Bertie

The alert reader would at this point ask me why I do not write my own texts.  That would certainly resolve the quality issue easily enough.  The problem I have found there is that whenever I do write the libretto, such as in my 1963 dramatic staged happening "A Sudden Slipping Vortex," all the talk the next day is about my brilliant word-crafting, and the music is left sadly neglected.

I also designed the program covers and catered the event

So, when all existing options are exhausted, one must innovate, and that is precisely what I have done in Oombayahamanasqotsi.  First, I translated the relevant Psalms with the assistance of Norbert Shadeg's seminal Balinese-English dictionary -- I should note emphatically that I started with the King James Version, and not that New International nonsense.  Then I made a statistical count of the number of occurrences for each phoneme, assigned them all a corresponding statistical weight, and rolled dice with the Word of God in order to randomly resort the sounds until I had created an arrangement I was satisfied with.  It truly made me wish that Cathy Berberian were still with us in order to premiere it.  Of course, there are other, more personal reasons for me to wish that she were still with us (or just me), but that is a story for another day.

Oh Cathy, has it been that long?

At any rate, the results have been more than satisfying, and I expect that Our Lady of Guadalupe School for Troubled Girls on 92nd and 4th will be quite pleased with their commission, assuming they are able to get a hold of enough Gambangs.