The Art Songs of Harry Somers (1925-1999): A brief survey by Brian Cherney
A brief survey by Brian Cherney
Strictly speaking, the art songs of Harry Somers span the entire length of his creative life. His earliest song, “Stillness,” was written in January 1942 when he was seventeen, only about three years after he began taking piano lessons. His last song, “Eternity,” was a very brief setting of a four-line poem of that name by William Blake, written shortly before his death in 1999. Another song, also using a brief poem of Blake, was planned but not written. Since by that time Somers was very ill, the song may or may not have been left as it was had he had more time to work on it. During the later 1940s and early 1950s, he produced a small number of conventional songs for voice and piano (including several sets) but in the 1960s he began to move away from his hitherto traditional use of the voice, culminating in more experimental works in the early 1970s, such as Voiceplay (for solo voice) and Kyrie (for solo voice, choir, and instruments). These are definitely not art songs. Later works for voice and piano include such pieces as the fourteen-minute-long operatic scene Love-In-Idleness (1976), with a text taken from Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night's Dream. The sheer length of this piece excludes it from the art song category, whereas Shaman's Song, for voice and prepared piano (1983), will be considered here. Although this piece is somewhat lengthy in terms of traditional songs, it is likely to be heard as a single, highly unified piece, not as a series of episodes. The particular use of the voice and its materials as well as the unusual nature of the piano accompaniment provide a consistent sound colour and atmosphere throughout. One could argue that it is a kind of extended and very intense art song—a stretched-out, magnified, and modified version of a traditional Lied, perhaps?
His earliest song, “Stillness,” was a setting of his own poem and was the first of his pieces, written in the 1940s (culminating in North Country for string orchestra in 1948), which were influenced by the landscape north-eastern Ontario, particularly the area of Temagami, which he had visited as a child with his parents:
Stillness The night is still, The night obeys the stillness, For the stillness is the power of the night. A breeze like a breath Beyond our reach, Gently ripples the meditating leaves. Far, far, so very far Into the night Faint stars make their impression Upon the velvet blue. The still, the breeze, the stars, the blue, Seem to blend into one, Into one soft note, One soft note of stillness.
This poetic depiction of the special qualities of the night (so dear to Romantic poets and musicians) no doubt sprang from the same fascination with the nocturnal world as had impelled Somers to wander the streets at night as a young child. (His correspondence and hastily jotted-down memoranda over the years are full of descriptions of night—the sounds, the light, etc.) In the 1950s the nocturnal world reappeared in the Five Songs for Dark Voice (“At four o’clock, before the dawn/ In the echoing street, there is yourself.”), although he himself did not write the text for these songs.
Some of the harmonic language of “Stillness” is based on stacked fifths in the left hand against fourths in the right, the latter a whole tone higher. This sounds like a thirteenth chord or a ninth chord with an added sixth. Chords often move in parallel motion, by semitone or whole tone in various voices. This is type of harmonic activity is typical of his other early music. The poem’s structure is faithfully reflected in the textural changes in the music, with the first verse basically melody with chordal accompaniment. The breeze in the second verse is represented in flowing arpeggio figures which, like certain of the harmonies, recall Debussy, especially because elements of the arpeggio are used to suggest a hidden melodic voice as a counterpoint to the voice line. In the third stanza the piano slows up into rising quarter-note arpeggios, again built on fifths (L.H.) and fourths (R.H.) moving in parallel motion; again, the harmony suggests major seventh or ninth chords. The last stanza reintroduces the harmony and texture of the opening and the “one soft note of stillness” appears as the pitch B-natural, which had appeared near the opening as the top note of the main reference harmony: A-E-B-C-sharp-F-sharp-B. The setting is syllabic throughout and the voice writing rather angular in places but generally unremarkable. There is nothing in Somers’s correspondence or other papers to indicate that the song was ever performed.
His first set of songs, entitled simply “Three Songs,” was commissioned by the Forest Hill Community Centre in Toronto, and written over a period of six months, beginning in January 1946. These were first performed by soprano Frances James, who performed much contemporary Canadian music in those years. All three poems are by Walt Whitman. It may be that Somers became interested in Whitman through his mother Ruth’s involvement with the Toronto Theosophical Society—Whitman was a figure greatly admired by the theosophists as far back as the 1890s. Whatever the impetus, all three poems depict nighttime. In “Look Down Fair Moon” the moon looks down upon the dead of the Civil War. “After the Dazzle of Day” depicts the stars which emerge in darkness, as well as the silence of the night, and the third song, “A Clear Midnight,” merges several previously depicted qualities of night that the soul can embrace and loves “best,” such as silence and stars but also sleep and death, as if the night sky offers the soul, a window to eternity. In these settings, the piano writing is more economical than in “Stillness” but still largely uses either chordal writing or arpeggiated figures, the latter either very short (suggesting the moon looking down) or very ornate and extended, as in the piano introduction to “After the Dazzle of Day” (to portray the “dazzle” of daylight). But the piano setting of the third song is the most effective, with its clear texture and motivic materials. A steady eighth-note semitone figure (A-sharp—B) above repeating octave E’s creates clarity but also suspense and is followed by an arpeggiated rhythmic figure, continuously repeated against the slow-moving voice part. This sequence is stated twice, thus providing a clear formal structure for the song (ABAB). The writing for the voice in these songs is expressive and less angular than in “Stillness” but still syllabic and rather careful, with brief melodic figures, repeated-note declamation of certain phrases, and the avoidance of sudden contrasts of register—in fact, the range of the voice part is confined to the staff. It’s interesting to note that the repeated-note declamation used early on recurs in his mature vocal writing, but the repetitions are more drawn out and intensified by the addition of a grace-note figure before each repeated note (see the first song in Evocations, for instance). In general, it seems as though he was, at this time and over the next few years, much more comfortable writing for the piano (his own instrument) than for the voice.
Those familiar with Somers’s juxtaposition of tonal and atonal passages in much of his music of the 1950s, will not be surprised to find examples of this in these early songs. “Look Down Fair Moon” begins with a rather dissonant piano introduction consisting of brief linear figures and dissonant chords (lower in register) but this all “resolves” to a plain d-minor chord when the voice enters—probably a way of contrasting the purity and beauty of the moon with the ghastly scene of bodies still lying on a battlefield many hours after they were killed. This juxtaposition is carried through to the final bars, again probably to underline the different images portrayed. Yet the song ends on a dissonant chord in the high register. There is no harmonic “resolution” of the scene depicted. On the other hand, “After the Dazzle of Day” concludes with a rising arpeggio figure built in fifths and fourths on C-sharp, suggesting in sound the last two words of the text— “symphony true.”
The title page of the original manuscript of “Three Songs” contains the following note: “with a fourth song which may or may not be included.” It may well be that this fourth song was never included in performances, since even on the Centrediscs recording of Somers’s songs (Songs from the Heart of Somers), this song is not included and there appears to be no recording of it. The title of the song is “A Song of Joys” and it is also a setting of Whitman, this time the first three verses of Whitman’s lengthy poem of that name. The song was written in 1947, and Somers entered it (as well as his Piano Sonata No. 1 [“Testament of Youth”]) in the Arts Competitions at the 1948 Summer Olympics in London. Neither piece won a medal (but John Weinzweig’s Divertimento No. 1 for flute and strings won a silver medal). The text (beginning “O to make the most jubilant song!”) is preceded by a substantial piano introduction which sets the mood, with its ¾ rhythm, fast tempo (marked “Allegro vivace, full of life, brimming over”) and homophonic texture. All of this gives the song the character of a fast, impetuous dance. The piano chords are, again, often built in fourths and fifths moving in parallel motion and these intervals are also prevalent in the voice part. In this song, the range of the voice part is somewhat more expansive than in the previous songs in the set, and its highest note, a G-flat 5, is saved until the very end, making the voice part even more effective and concluding the song with a sense of triumph.
In 1947 Somers wrote a single song, entitled A Bunch of Rowan, with a text by Diana Skala. Skala was not only a poet whose work had appeared in the periodical Saturday Night but had, evidently, studied piano and composition at the Toronto Conservatory of Music during the early 1930s, according to a short memoir she wrote years later (“A Letter from Sir Charles G.D. Roberts [A Personal Memoir],” published in Studies in Canadian Literature XI, no.2 [1986]). The “rowan” of the title refers to the rowan tree which, in some cultures, is thought to give protection from malevolent persons and/or witches. In the poem, the narrator, who seems to have led a life of excessive pleasure, asks to be laid to rest “where the willows are listening… with a bunch of rowan upon my breast” since she (or he?) does not know “evil from good.” The musical setting of this doleful, three-stanza poem, with its slow, steady tempo, has the quality of a dirge, with rolled chords in one or both hands of the piano which proceed in even, slow quarter notes in the actual accompaniment of the text. These rolled chords suggest the strumming of a string instrument and the frequent d-minor harmony, with chromatic slides to more dissonant chords or simply to a contrasting triad, suggest that Somers intended this setting to evoke the sense of a bard or minstrel singing of the deeds of a hero (or heroine?). The triadic arpeggiation in the voice part tends to support this impression. On the other hand, a short piano introduction consists of a high melodic voice which adds strong dissonances to the underlying d-minor harmony. This introduction returns in more or less the same way between each stanza, while each stanza is set to essentially the same music; thus, the setting is strophic (which also supports the idea of a song performed by a bard). It may be that Somers intended the tonal music to represent the “good” and the dissonant chords (many of which are ninth chords on G-flat) to represent “evil,” which the narrator cannot distinguish between (“For I know not evil from good.”). A Bunch of Rowan was performed in the summer of 1949 in Budapest during the second World Festival of Youth and Students.
Somers’s next set of songs, entitled Three Simple Songs, was written in 1953 and two of the songs were first performed 20 November 1954 at a Canadian League of Composers concert in Hamilton, Ontario by mezzo-soprano Trudy Carlyle and Mario Bernardi. The texts of the songs (“The Garden,” “Asleep,” and “My Faith Move Mountains”) were written by the Toronto lawyer and poet Michael Fram (1923-1989), who wrote the texts for no fewer than six works of Somers between 1953 and 1956, including two important works of those years: the one-act opera The Fool (1953) and the orchestral cycle Five Songs for Dark Voice (1956), the latter premiered by Maureen Forrester at the 1956 Stratford Festival. Fram was actually practicing law during these years but was also a serious poet who had met Somers through the latter’s first wife, Catherine Mackie.
The texts of Three Simple Songs are far more complex and enigmatic than the texts of the previous settings. The first two songs, “The Garden,” “Asleep,” both depict young children, first at play, then asleep, and in both there is a sense that the parent who is surveying the children wants to protect them from the world of adult emotions (“futile laugh,” “infected anger”) or, as in “Asleep,” prevent anything from interrupting their sleep. (Fram and his wife were the parents of young children during these years.) The piano accompaniments of these two poems are far thinner and more linear than in the Whitman songs. It looks as though a twelve-tone row was used to some extent in the first song but not systematically, since there are also scale-like figures, chords built in fourths and fifths, but there are again here unexpected juxtapositions of atonal and tonal pitch structures. This is especially true in the second song, in which the middle section is like the recitative format of some eighteenth-century opera, with e-minor and d-minor rolled chords providing the harmonic underpinning of each short phrase in the voice. The piano parts of the outer sections, however, are dissonant, whether the texture is chordal or linear. The voice part in these songs is generally more angular, disjunct, and wider in range than in the Whitman songs, yet still essentially lyrical.
The text of the third song, “My Faith Move Mountains,” seems to imply that only deep faith can banish “anguish, uncertainty and fear” and it is possible that the extended, empty fifths in the right hand of the piano (E-B-E), with sharp interjections in the left hand, are one of the symbols used in the song to suggest faith and strength (the others being the empty fifths, a major third apart, at extreme ends of the keyboard, which begin and finish the song, and the other being the insistent thirty-second note figure in both hands, with its periodic dissonance of A against B-flat, which surrounds the words “The sharp particular anguish uncertainty and fear”). This is a powerfully striking setting of the text, and it provides a welcome contrast to the gentler first two songs.
The last song completed during these early years was Conversation Piece, also a setting of a poem by Michael Fram. Written in 1955, this poem consists of three stanzas (like A Bunch of Rowan). In the first two stanzas, the poet wonders: (stanza 1) what swans say to each other as they glide along a river and (stanza 2) what is said (conveyed?) in a plant when whatever communication (conversation?) there is moves from the earth up through the plant until the leaves meet the air. In the third stanza, the question of communication is carried through to humans (“we”) who are “in silence by the river.” The images of darkness and river, carried through the second stanza (“Touching as darkness on the river.”), return yet again in the third stanza, but now the image of the swans returns as well but they are silent (“In utter clarity of silence speaking.”). Thus, a kind of oxymoron: speaking, yet silence.
The musical setting of this poem will strike anyone who has read my descriptions of the previous songs as extremely surprising, but this surprise can readily be assuaged by placing this 1955 song in the larger context of Somers’s music of the 1950s. He became fascinated by certain Baroque techniques such as counterpoint and fugue. One of his best-known works of this period was the Passacaglia and Fugue for orchestra, written the previous year, but there is also a set of fugues for piano (12 X 12) as well as other fugues and contrapuntal passages scattered through his music until the end of the 1950s. Some of these works (such as 12 X 12) also make use of twelve-tone related methods of pitch organization but this is certainly not the case with Conversation Piece. The song is in g-minor (complete with two flats in the key signature) and features an omni-present bass ostinato that moves back and forth at the pace of a quarter note between a perfect fifth (G—D) and the upper and lower neighbor notes of the D. The right hand of the piano accompaniment consists mostly of a duet in which the voices, in close proximity, move along smoothly in flowing rhythms that are distinctly Baroque in nature. At times, the two voices even proceed in a chain of two-three suspensions. The voice part is far more continuous and carefully shaped here than in previous songs. In each stanza, the voice part forms a long arc, gradually rising over the course of the stanza and then descending into the original register. The voice part is similar in all three stanzas, but the climax of the voice part, a high A marked double forte, occurs on the word “air,” the last word in the third line of the second stanza. Perhaps the greatest surprise in the song is the last phrase, which consists of a long melismatic vocalise on an “Ah,” the sort of melisma one might find in an aria in a Bach cantata. At the end, the singer moves from an “oh” (slowed up) to sustain the final note G on an “mm. Thus, the mouth must be closed, which alters the timbre of that final note. These final, contrasting measures cannot easily be explained with reference to the poem, but they are an interesting portend of things to come in Somers’s writing for voice. The previous songs are basically syllabic settings of the texts—they serve the purpose but are not particularly striking. At the end of Conversation Piece, however, something seems to have impelled him to do something more with the voice and these tentative steps towards abandoning a text and resorting to just pitched sound material anticipate what he was to do in the 1960s in Twelve Miniatures and Evocations.
In the next stage of Somers’s development as a composer, in the 1960s and beyond, vocal writing became a central concern, culminating in the early 1970s with such experimental works as Voiceplay 1972), written for Cathy Berberian, and Chura-churum (1985). And, of course, in 1967 his opera Louis Riel was premiered, to great acclaim; this work is regarded as one of his greatest achievements.
In the early-to-mid 1960s, there were two works which were the starting point for this new interest: Twelve Miniatures for voice and instrumental trio (1963) and Evocations for voice and piano (1966). Both of these were CBC commissions. Twelve Miniatures is not, strictly speaking, an “art song,” since it involves not only a solo singer and a keyboard instrument (either piano or spinet), but also flute and cello (or recorder and viola da gamba). It should be included in this brief survey, however, since it is not only one of the finest pieces Somers wrote but also the starting point for his exploration of new vocal techniques in the years to come. Twelve Miniatures was commissioned for Rowland and Carol Pack by the CBC and begun during the summer of 1962 in the Gaspé area of Quebec. It may be that the rhythm of the sea here influenced certain aspects of the first miniature (“Springtime Sea”), since there are eleven instrumental repetitions of a small cluster of fragments that gently appear and disappear, suggesting a recurring wave pattern of some kind. The work was completed during the following winter (1962-63). In May of 1963 Catherine, Somers’s first wife, died by suicide. Subsequently, Somers dedicated Twelve Miniatures to her memory.
The texts are taken from a collection of Haiku poems selected from an anthology published by Harold Henderson (An Introduction to Haiku) and are arranged in four groups of three, covering the four seasons of the year. The opening and closing miniatures (“Springtime Sea” and “The River”) share the same material, thus suggesting the human life cycle as well. A detailed description of Twelve Miniatures would be far beyond the scope of this survey. (A detailed analysis may be found in this writer’s 1975 monograph on Somers.) However, a few things should be mentioned here. By this time (the early 1960s), the juxtaposition of tonal and non-tonal passages on Somers’s music had disappeared. Twelve Miniatures does not contain any tonal music. It is constructed with small pitch cells, usually with different cells assigned to different instruments or voice; these may or may not comprise the full complement of twelve pitches. If there is a complete twelve-tone series, the order of pitches may not be retained. The effectiveness of these songs is partly due to their considerable variety of textures and colours. A few of the songs are very brief, a matter of a few seconds. Some have sustained and expressive lines (e.g. No. 2, “The Skylark, in which the flute and voice alternate short solo phrases until the very end, where voice, flute, and piano conclude together on the word “gone”). Others have a more fragmented texture, such as No. 11, in which a twelve-note series is used quite strictly in all parts, but the texture consists of single, separated, staccato notes in each part (to suggest the words “the snowflakes fall”). One of the most admirable features of Twelve Miniatures is the restraint with which Somers set the texts—there is a wonderful balance between the means used to set the texts and the word painting provided by the music. The textures are thin but scored in such a way as to contribute just the right amount of colour and support for the voice.
As mentioned, Twelve Miniatures is the beginning of Somers’s exploration of new vocal techniques. In the monograph on Somers referred to above, some of these are mentioned:
[A new approach to writing for voice] is to be found not only in the use of the accented grace note figure (as in 'Springtime Sea'), which occurs in subsequent vocal writing of the sixties, but in the use of non-traditional inflections and timbres to help evoke the image of the text. In The Portent' (the fifth song), for instance, the motionless intensity of a hot summer day is suggested by quarter-tone inflections around and between G and Ab (sung senza vibrato); the voice, which never deviates from this static inertia, is accompanied by a pedal B harmonic in the cello. In 'Lament' (example 6.2) the slides help to evoke the appropriate atmosphere, a frequent technique in twentieth-century threnodies (for example, the opening section of Crumb's Black Angels). In 'The Scarecrow,' the soprano whispers the entire text in terse, clipped phrases.
The other work for voice and piano of the 1960s, Evocations for mezzo-soprano and piano, was again a CBC commission, completed in February 1966. When it was broadcast on CBC radio the following year, the performers were Patricia Rideout, mezzo-soprano, and Somers himself as pianist. This was probably one of the few times he performed as a pianist in his mature years, even though he had studied piano seriously until 1948 and had become an accomplished pianist. He also wrote the four texts for Evocations himself; there are many similarities in these to the text of his first song, “Stillness,” discussed at the beginning of this survey. For instance, the first song in Evocations contains words and phrases such as “Wreath of night,” “Darkness,” “womb of night,” “stillness”, and “night sounds.” The central image here is the loon; the “oo” sound in loon, the “crah” sound in the word “cry,” and the “cah” sound in “call” are both extended with repeated-note figures and a short single note preceded by one or more grace notes. The damper pedal is held down throughout this first song, thus allowing the voice part to echo in the vibrating piano strings—this is an imaginative way of evoking the sound of a loon over a northern lake (at dusk, perhaps?). The second song contains a number of images associated with light: shattered, refracted, shimmering, for instance, and the piano part provides appropriately striking figures to evoke these—fast arpeggiated figures, high, dissonant tremolo figures, always in irregular and unpredictable formations. The fourth song returns to images associated with night and darkness: “Moon cracks and spreads winter night/Cold heart of emptiness...In the womb is contained the tomb.” In this last song the middle section of the voice part is built entirely around the sounds of “oo,” “ah,” “oh,” and “mm.” These are derived from the words themselves and replace the words, except for the briefly spoken phrase “In the womb is contained the tomb.” During these sounds, the pianist does not have a notated part but is invited to “add percussive ‘comment’ by hitting the inner ribs and frame of the piano with mallets or with the knuckles.” The concluding gesture in the piano is simply the suggestion, through a wavy line, of a rapid figure going from the low to high register of the piano, in other words, improvised. (However, Somers thoughtfully provides a written-out passage for “tired” pianists.) The singer must scream or violently gasp (or both), towards the end.
All of this indicates that in Evocations Somers fully entered the world of contemporary music of the 1960s but another major feature of the songs confirms this—there is virtually no traditional metrical notation in this work. Durations and pacing of various notes, figures, and vocal phrases are notated in such a way as to give considerable flexibility to the performers. In the second song there are cues from one performer to the other to ensure coordination at certain points, while the beginning of the third song is written out in groups of sixteenth notes and the tempo fluctuates but the pianist is instructed to use these only as a guide. The chromatic clusters which open the last song are all notated in whole notes, but the instructions are: “long values, all variable duration.” In the years after 1960, when Somers had spent a year in Paris, he was clearly paying far more attention to international developments in contemporary music than he had during the 1950s. Even the orchestral work Stereophony, written in 1962-63, indicates this. As well, he was involved in the CBC new music program Music of Today from January 1965 until June of 1969. Through his work on this program, he was able to hear recordings of every imaginable type of contemporary music from every part of the world. Thus, many of the approaches found in Evocations can be found in the scores of major figures, whether they be Berio or Stockhausen or Crumb.
However, it should be noted that some of his other vocal music of the 1960s is quite conventional from the point of exploring new vocal techniques. This includes the choral pieces God the Master of this Scene (1962), Gloria (1962), The Wonder Song (1964), and Five Songs of the Newfoundland Outports (1969), the latter being one of his most successful and most performed works.
As indicated earlier, there are a number of later vocal works which involve piano and one or more voices. These do not, with perhaps one exception, fall under the “art song” category. Love-In-Idleness has already been mentioned, as has Shaman's Song, for voice and prepared piano. The latter piece, written in 1983 as the test piece for the S. C. Eckhardt-Gramatté Competition of that year, could be regarded as an extended version of the traditional art song. The piece does have a text that has the words of Uvavnuk, a Netsilik Inuit woman:
The great sea has set me in motion Set me adrift, Moving me as the reed moves in a river. The arch of sky and mightiness of storms Have moved the spirit within me, Till I am carried away Trembling with joy.
However, the text appears only sporadically through the piece and is sung, but the extensions of the words through vowel sounds (notated in the International Phonetic Alphabet notation) are far more prominent in the song. (In fact, the sung words of the text do not appear until the fourth page of the score.) The nine-and-a-half-minute song is a long build-up to an intense climax that occurs only at the very end of the piece, with a high, double-forte C reached in the voice part and rapid, steady rhythmic activity in the piano. Much of the piano activity takes place in the middle register of the piano. In the version for soprano (on the Centredisc recording), this music is played in the area in which the strings are prepared with eraser wedges. The result is that much of the piano writing throughout sounds like small, unpitched drums or perhaps plucked strings, although periodically the pianist plays rapid arpeggiated figures in the high register (not affected by the eraser wedges) or harmonics created on low strings. Special muffling or dampening effects on low strings are heard in steady rhythms at the beginning of the song; this also produces a drum-like effect and ensures a suitably atmospheric background for the sung vowels of the opening.
The long buildup of tension in Shaman's Song is comparable to similar procedures throughout Somers’s music, for instance, in the first movement of North Country (1948) or the first part of the orchestral piece Stereophony (1963). The small vocal figures and motives in the piece are very similar to such things in both Twelve Miniatures and Evocations. Thus, there is a line of continuity, a well-defined character in the music of Somers which can be traced back through much of his work.
Brian Cherney
April 2025
Montréal
Montreal composer Brian Cherney has written well over one hundred pieces, many of these commissioned by the CBC and other organizations over a period of many years. One of his most recent works, the String Quartet no. 7, was commissioned by the Molinari Quartet and premiered in 2023. For more than fifty years he taught composition, twentieth-century analysis and music history, and Canadian music at McGill University, where he is now Professor Emeritus. His latest book, Between Composers: The Letters of Norma Beecroft and Harry Somers (McGill-Queen's University Press) was published in the fall of 2024. He is currently working on a new book on the life and music of Harry Somers. His earlier book on Somers, published by the University of Toronto Press in 1975, was the first full-length study of a Canadian composer.