(In) Habitation: Musical Settings of Margaret Atwood Poetry by American Women Composers

(In) Habitation: Musical Settings of Margaret Atwood Poetry by American Women Composers. Eileen Strempel, soprano; Sylvie Beaudette, piano. (Centaur CRC 3002; 63:29). Judith Cloud: Dreams: Night Poem, Siren Song, Variations on the Word Sleep, Flying Inside Your Own Body. Elisenda Fabregas: Moments of Change: Moment, Habitation, More and More, is Dangerous to Read Newspapers, Late Night. Lori Laitman: Orange Afternoon Lover: Against Still Life, I Was Reading a Scientific Journal, I Am Sitting On the Edge. Tania Leon: Atwood Songs: Notes Towards a Poem That Can Never be Written, Memory, Eating Fire, Habitation, Four Evasions. Amanda Harberg: Memory (Midnight Songs). Libby Larsen: Take. This recording represents one of the most auspicious art song projects of the new century, and one would never guess that it began under such simple and even sweet circumstances. In 2004, Canadian novelist and poet Margaret Atwood was invited to Syracuse University at the invitation of a selection committee that included Eileen Strempel, an associate professor of art and music there and an active soprano highly regarded as an interpreter of modern art song. In anticipation of the award-winning writer's visit, Strempel read a great deal of Atwood's work and sought out whatever musical settings of her texts she could find. Regrettably, there turned out to be startlingly few of them, which inspired Strempel to pursue what ultimately became known as the Atwood Project. With the writer's enthusiastic blessing, six composers were commissioned to set texts of their own choosing to music. In part to commemorate the thirtieth anniversary of the National Women's History Project, all six composers approached for the project were women: Judith Cloud, Elisenda Fabregas, Amanda Harberg, Lori Laitman, Libby Larsen, and Tania Leon. Three years later, Eileen Strempel and her long-time collaborator Sylvie Beaudette premiered these nineteen songs in what had to have been an evening of remarkable excitement, with Ms. Atwood and four of the six composers in attendance. Needless to say, most of us were not there, but this recording is an attempt to convey what it would have felt like to be in the audience that night to hear these striking songs unveiled for the very first time. Margaret Atwood's work has garnered widespread acclaim for its bold, incisive exploration of the human experience, the rich vividness of her verbal palette, and the restless inventiveness of her craftsmanship. Still, it is probably not an accident that her texts have found rather limited musical life, for they are likely to be as intimidating as they are inspiring to would-be composers. Her poems tend not to flow sweetly and predictably, and many of them are so potent on their own that one has to wonder whether setting them to music can be anything but a distraction from or a reduction in their impact. It is a tribute to these six composers that they undertook the challenge and managed to create unfailingly compelling songs. The liner notes begin with a quote from Carol Kimball, one of the country's most esteemed authorities on art song (and a regular contributor to Journal of Singing), in which she says that one mark of a fine art song is that the listener finds it all but impossible to think of the music and text as separate ingredients that have been combined, but rather will take them in as a seamless whole and an utterly new creation. One might think of this as the Wagnerian concept of Gesamtkunstwerk (all-encompassing artwork), but on a much more intimate scale. And yet, there are songs in this recording where the relationship of music to text is more unsettled than that, and one is much more aware that this is a poem that someone has set to music. But even in these more effortfully executed songs there is much to appreciate and admire, even as they also help us appreciate the mastery of those songs where music and text are almost mystically one. …

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