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A Red Couch Floating in Lake Erie
Sheffer, a composer as well as conductor, had relocated to Cleveland, and became involved with all things Cleveland, including subscribing to the magazine. Now in its fifth season, several concerts by red had featured his music, and he had serious thoughts about an entire concert of his own music. He had a fair amount to choose from, but he wanted something specific to red. Maybe even something about Cleveland to go along with a saxophone concerto he’d written a few years ago, and some arrangements of Bach preludes in the manner of minimalist composers such as Philip Glass and Steve Reich. Nothing quite fell into place. But then, just about a year ago, angle published a review of the book Cleveland in Prose and Poetry, edited by Bonnie Jacobson, for the Poets and Writers League of Greater Cleveland. The review was so enticing, Sheffer immediately ordered it, and it was love at first reading, he says. Within the first hour of opening the book, he’d found his muse. He chose several poems, mostly by Cleveland poets, and a few prose statements from famous folks who visited. “Great things were said here,” says Sheffer. “It was a natural, although not all the words I used are from the book.” In this instance, words came first. “I wanted the libretto done before the first note of the music,” says Sheffer. “Of course, some of my first choices wouldn’t work; they were too long or too difficult. Not all poems can be set to music, while others just lend themselves to the collaboration so beautifully.” Having done his homework, Sheffer knew some famous writers needed to be included. Hart Crane, for instance, and Richard Howard. Crane’s words were especially difficult. “His word associations were very modern for the time, and really resisted the music. I finally found two lines that worked, although not everyone will understand them, either.” Studying Cleveland’s history made it fairly easy to come up with five themes that define our city: symbols, music, sports, weather, and perhaps the most important of all, regeneration. Memory and Metaphor includes a glimpse of Public Square by Betty Ann Blakeslee and the poem that gave the piece its name the piece, part of a larger work called “The Art of Poetry” by former Clevelander Karen Kovacik, now Director of Creative Writing at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis plus the lines by Crane and Howard. Music in its various forms is the very essence of Cleveland, and features a mini-musical about our city (by John Stickney) set to variations on Tea for Two. This is followed by a “blues” duet by Carl Sandburg and contemporary poet George Bilgere, and closes with The Sound of The Oboe about the late and greatly missed John Mack of the Cleveland Orchestra. Ray Chapman, the only major-league baseball player to die from an on-field incident, was a Cleveland player, immortalized by Robert McDonough in Hit By A Pitch. Sheffer made a mini-opera for three voices to tell this story, whereas It’s How You Play the Game by Megan M. Senthil, which is about football—specifically the Browns—is turned into a march. Helen Keller’s poetic prose on her 1913 visit to Cleveland in a blizzard (originally published in the Plain Dealer) becomes an aria for soprano. The final section The Past and The Future includes words from Malcolm X, Susan B. Anthony, Eugene Debs, and Franklin D. Roosevelt. As you might expect, these words were ahead of the times in which they were spoken, but are all still relevant. This finale is “operatic, a very big chorale” says the composer. For the last ten years, Sheffer has employed the same method of composition. He starts with a tone row, using all 12 notes in the scale, although not in order, and from there, a musical language emerges, according to whatever he’s writing. “The music may veer in and out of tonality, with sometimes ugly and strange harmonics” he says, “but it all ties together. For instance, in the Red Couch piece, the l<?xml:namespace prefix = st1 /><st1:place w:st="on">ake</st1:place> just sort of meanders along—water has no tonal center as such—but out of that came the big melody for the finale.” Asked to describe the music, Sheffer says, “It’s Broadway to opera to symphonic and then everything else.” Of course. The five singers are soprano Andrea Chenoweth and mezzo Nichol Larimer, recent graduates of CIM, tenor Carl Halvorson of New York and baritones Andrew Garland of Massachusetts and James Martin, also of New York.
First appeared in Issue 31, March/April 2007
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