Willow Songs (2009)

Willow Songs performed by Alison Morgan (soprano), Jenny Duck-Chong (mezzo-soprano), Sally Walker (alto flute and piccolo), Jason Noble (clarinet in A and bass clarinet), John Douglas (percussion), Sally Whitwell (piano), Mark Shiell (conductor)

Willow Songs was a finalist in the Song Cycle category of the 2013 Paul Lowin Awards.

Program note

I discovered Anne Stevenson’s poetry only when her collection Poems 1955–2005 came out, and immediately fell under the spell of her writing.

There were quite a few poems in the book that I felt might sound well sung. In particular, the poem entitled ‘Willow Song’ seemed to be there on the page just waiting for its tune. Of the other poems that struck me, several were about women at different points in their lives. I decided to make a group of these to form the main body of the work, before finishing with ‘Willow Song’ itself. The obvious strategy was to begin with the poem about the 12- year-old girl and then arrange the others in ascending order of age. But I thought this might be too obvious (and anyway I’d done precisely that in my song cycle Learning to Howl). So I reversed the order and opted to begin with the wildness and energy of the ‘cold woman’ in her ‘cold sea’. Adding the little ‘Epigraph’ was an afterthought, though it comes first.

Willow Songs was commissioned by Halcyon, with generous financial support from Barbara Blackman. Parts of it were sketched in 2007 and 2008, but the bulk of it was composed from April to July 2009.

© A.F.

Texts

Epigraph

Birth.
Impossible to imagine
Not knowing how to expect.

Childbirth.
Impossible to imagine
Years of the tall son.

Death.
Impossible to imagine,
Exactly, exactly.

On Watching a Cold Woman Wade into a Cold Sea

The way that wintry woman
Walked into the sea
Was as if, in adultery,
She strode to her leman.*

Something in the way she
Shrugged off her daughters,
Moping by the sea’s hem
As if they were human.

But she of the pedigree
And breed of Poseidon,
Slicing through the breakers
With her gold plated knees,
Twisting up her hair
With a Medusan gesture;

Something in the augury
She took from her nature
Made women look at women
Over stiff cups of tea,
And husbands in their season
Sigh suburbanly to see her.

Oh go dally with your children
Or your dogs, naked sirs!
The venom of the ocean
Is as kindness to hers.

* leman = lover

Eros

I called for love
But help me, who arrives?
This thug with broken nose
And squinty eyes.
‘Eros, my bully boy,
Can this be you,
With boxer lips
And patchy wings askew?’

‘Madam,’ cries Eros,
‘Know the brute you see
Is what long overuse
Has made of me.
My face that so offends you
Is the sum
Of blows your lust delivered
One by one.

We slaves who are immortal
Gloss your fate
And are the archetypes
That you create.
Better my battered visage,
Bruised but hot,
Than love dissolved in loss
Or left to rot.’

Fool’s Gold
(A Saturday Night Sonnet)

Girls in their nervous freedom, heeled and painted,
Swarm out in teams – oh, bold pursuit of passion!
Geared for the sexual snatch, they seem acquainted
With all the ways and means of public fashion.
Who has not seen them, arm in arm, come rolling,
Midriffs agape but fending off all gazes,
Haughty and cool, forbidding yet controlling;
Each breast inflames us, every hip amazes.
Girls, were these parts for other girls created?
Walking exposed, you shrug aside our doting.
Or has the art of dressing been defeated
By skilfulness in wearing nearly nothing?
If so, put on your clothes and tease our pleasure.
Bared flesh is fool’s gold, wealth’s a buried treasure.

Incident

She must have been about
twelve in 1942.

She stood in front
of the tall hall mirror
and she made a mou.
With her pretty not-
yet-kissed mouth she made an ugly
mou mou
that didn’t mean anything
she knew.
So bony, so skinny,
and so very naked.
Little pink belled swellings.
Two.

The mirror did what she did.
Mou mou. Mou mou.

Nowhere to go.
Nothing to do.

Epigraph

Birth.
Impossible to imagine
Not knowing how to expect.

Childbirth.
Impossible to imagine
Years of the tall son.

Death.
Impossible to imagine,
Exactly, exactly.

Willow Song

I went down to the railway
But the railway wasn’t there.
A long scar lay across the waste
Bound up with vetch and maidenhair
And birdsfoot trefoils everywhere.
But the clover and the sweet hay,
The cranesbill and the yarrow
Were as nothing to the rose bay
the rose bay, the rose bay
As nothing to the rose bay willow.

I went down to the river
But the river wasn’t there.
A hill of slag lay in its course
With pennycress and cocklebur
And thistles bristling with fur.
But ragweed, dock and bitter may
and hawkbit in the hollow
Were as nothing to the rose bay
the rose bay, the rose bay
As nothing to the rose bay willow.

I went down to find my love.
But my sweet love wasn’t there.
A shadow stole into her place
And spoiled the loosestrife of her hair
And counselled me to pick despair.
Old elder and young honesty
Turned ashen, but their sorrow
Was as nothing to the rose bay
the rose bay, the rose bay
As nothing to the rose bay willow.

Oh I remember summer
When the hemlock was in leaf.
The sudden poppies by the path
Were little pools of crimson grief.
Sick henbane cowered like a thief.
But self-heal sprang up in her way,
And mignonette’s light yellow,
To flourish with the rose bay
the rose bay, the rose bay
To flourish with the rose bay willow.

Its flames took all the wasteland
And all the river’s silt,
But as my dear grew thin and grey
They turned as white as salt or milk.
Great purples withered out of guilt,
And bright weeds blew away
In cloudy wreaths of summer snow.
And the first one was the rose bay
the rose bay, the rose bay
The first one was the rose bay willow.

© Anne Stevenson, from Poems 1955–2005, published by Bloodaxe Books.

The words are used by kind permission of the poet.

Reviews

Willow Songs was commissioned by Halcyon, with financial support from Barbara Blackman. It was a good investment. As the composer Andrew Ford says, Anne Stevenson's 'Willow Song' is a ballad waiting to be sung, and Ford finds a gentle lyricism to illuminate the words, enriched by extremes of timbre from piccolo and bass clarinet. This work is an intimate engagement with sensuality, from a woman's point of view, and Ford's music treads carefully, serving the words well without making overly grand gestures of his own. I particularly liked the tough, worldly-wise voices of 'Eros' and the 'Cold Woman', spiked with percussive textures. 'Fools Gold' was an excruciating mixture of fun and folly, and 'Epigraph' hung in the air, pregnant with meaning.

Harriet Cunningham, Sydney Morning Herald

Andrew Ford’s Willow Songs is a through-composed setting of five poems by British poet Anne Stevenson, with an additional ‘Epigraph’ at the beginning and repeated just before the final song . . . The poems, which cover aspects of life and death, are wryly amusing, somewhat cynical and occasionally bleak. Overall, their mood is unsettling and Ford’s interpretation reflects well the emotional content. His music is both striking and most enjoyable. The opening is angular and stark, as he describes ‘The way that wintry woman/ Walked into the sea’, changing to insistent, nagging rhythms as he paints the picture of a less-than-perfect lover. A lively, jazzy section depicts two young girls out on the town, ‘midriffs agape’, to the poet’s warning that ‘bared flesh is fool’s gold’. In a contrasting, quiet passage we glimpse a skinny 12 year-old girl in front of a mirror, with ‘nowhere to go, nothing to do’ – this, presumably, is before she gets to the bared midriff stage of the previous song. The final Willow Song is a lament, evocative of the famous Millais painting of Ophelia as she drifts down a willow-lined stream, clasping a bunch of flowers. It is strophic, folksong-like, beautiful, a sombre lullaby and truly enchanting.

Gwen Bennett, The Music Trust