Amongst Canadian Music Centre (CMC) Prairie Region's most recent acquisitions were eighteen (18) works by Associate Composer and recently retired Dr. William Jordan. CMC Prairie Region's director, John Reid, sat down with Jordan to discuss these works as well as his plans for future compositions.
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John Reid: Bill, we have received a very large set of (what we call) new acquisitions to the library — eighteen works. Wow! Would you please talk about this substantial addition to the collection of your compositions at the CMC?
William Jordan: The eighteen works you refer to are "final edits," so to speak, of works composed over the past decades, including from before I came to Canada. During the last thirty years I have been laying out these works in computer-assisted notation. Every new iteration of the software has prompted new edits, but only after I retired from teaching did I have the time to really undertake this project. I made new arrangements of some things, retitled some things, generally made final revisions. That meant they were ready for the CMC, hence the submission of songs and piano works. Chamber music is in progress, and once that's done, I can turn to the large works: concerti, opera, orchestral pieces.
JR: Thirteen of the eighteen new works are for voice with various instrumental combinations. Would you please comment on your interest in and commitment to writing for the voice and secondly any thoughts you wish to share about any/all of these thirteen pieces?
WJ: I have always composed for the voice. Many decades ago, as modernist strategies from the 1950s and 60s began to take the "post-modern" turn, I decided to invent a special category for my practice, emphasizing biography, portraiture, and the singing voice. This was to keep the focus on the precise characteristics of individuals: What's the story, how do they look, how do they sound? So, it was a natural decision to rummage through huge amounts of poetry, looking for tonal and emotional qualities that I felt I could work with. I set a lot of poetry by women and gay men, attempting to find my own resonance in those words. I was also very taken with the poetry and thought of Wallace Stevens, an American modernist whose work continued to speak after many other modernist poets had ceased to attract me.
Many of these works were conceived as cycles of songs by a particular poet; others are single songs that I have arranged together to form something like an arc for the artists and audience to follow. For example, I had composed two of the five songs of With Rural Pen decades ago and only completed the cycle in 2019. Other cycles include the Ann Hebert settings (Une Ville du Toile), the anti-war feminist poems with flute and violin (A Whisper of Sequins), and the Cummings settings (Four from Xaipe). The Wallace Stevens cycles were assembled from songs composed over decades: The First Light of Evening, and Howls in the Mind are examples. There are some sacred settings as well: the Ambrose Hymns for soprano and organ, and the Magnificat setting in both English and Latin, based on a psalm-tone from 19th century America. Rest in the Arms of Love is a collection of favorites by different poets. Finally there are concert arias: The Idea of Order at Key West (Wallace Stevens) is in two versions. Originally composed for Lute and Countertenor (!), it is now available for voice and guitar, and for voice and piano as well. To the One of Fictive Music (Stevens again) is the concert aria that got all this started back in the mid-1970s. The Leaden Echo and the Golden Echo (Gerard Manley Hopkins), likewise, is a large-scale virtuosic concert aria.
JR: The remaining five scores are for solo piano and to this non-pianist’s eye, they seem quite virtuosic. Would you please give us some thoughts about your writing for piano and also about these five wide-ranging works in particular?
WJ: The five works for solo piano that I submitted recently were composed over decades as well. Both piano sonatas and the Three Pieces were composed in good-old India ink. The Three Pieces were originally for piano and solo instrument. I've orchestrated them (a recording of the orchestral version of Elegy is on Sundogs disc, ed. note: University of Calgary Orchestra on the Unical label available from Canadian Music Centre website) but I'm happy with them as piano solos that I can play, daunting as they are. A comment may help; since I've retired, I've raided the IMSLP website for arrangements of orchestral music from the late 19th century. Most people are aware of rehearsal scores for ballets and operas, designed for accomplished pianists who work for the companies. But remember that in the late 19th century there was a piano in every home, and piano transcriptions of orchestral music were ubiquitous, including (for example) a piano transcription of Strauss's Also Sprach Zarathustra--a hoot to play through. Since retirement I've also had time to get reacquainted with the Godowsky transcriptions (Chopin, Schubert, Bach) and the extremely refined piano technique that is summoned by these works. Pure pleasure at slow tempos! So the piano is once again my best friend.
The two studies were composed independently--in C major and A minor, this suggests a cycle might be coming but that hasn't happened. Instead, I decided to compose 24 preludes following the key layout of the Chopin preludes that are included in this submission. There are other piano works of mine at the CMC, and I may have to take another look at some of those to bring them up to the current standard, but that's for another time.
*Originally published in the Canadian Music Centre Prairie Region's April Newsletter. Shared with permission.
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