An die Musik - Tom Lane

Lead Can Fly, podcast for contemporary art song. Hello and a warm welcome to Lead Can Fly. My name is Sabine Burke and I created this podcast to give contemporary art song.

a heart and an ear in the internet and i'm very happy that so many composers from many countries take part and it's growing and growing and today i'm very thrilled because we've got a british composer that who lives in ireland and that's tom lane hello tom hi how are you hi good good to see you and i'm i'm very very happy to have you here

tom i will present you a little bit you're born in bristol you have a german mother and as i suppose an english father maybe that's right yeah that's correct and you studied at the baliol college in oxford you studied music and then composition at the royal academy of music and then composition and experimental music theater at the berlin university of the arts and then

You also absolved a PhD in site-specific composition at the University of Cork. Yeah. And you've been writing... for orchestra you've been writing for opera but also for contemporary dance and for theater plays and soundscapes sound design so you have a very broad field of experience and you have been working at many theaters in ireland you were associate artist of the gate theater you've been collaborating with the abbey theater

you've been nominated seven times for the irish time theater award for example for the best soundscape or the best opera your piece nocturne was performed 2023 by the national symphony orchestra of ireland so um just apologize for my stumbling in my english sometimes difficult to bring all the wonderful names into one little introduction of course yeah no i would your english is much better than my german because i haven't practiced very much recently well thank you

And Tom, you've been also working recently with Theater Trier, with the choreographer Hannes Langolf for his piece Unruhe. And this year, in August, you have been working. with the Neue Staatsoper im Künstlerhaus Wien for a choreography with impulse tons. So, Tom, what I'm really, really thrilled about is that you like to work with... choreographers and dancers and actors and and you also play the viola and you're also a singer so

i would say you're very you have a very broad horizon and um yeah i'd say so yeah um that's very kind of you to say yeah And also as your mother is German and you studied in Germany, and I came through to your name because I just stumbled into a wonderful woman in Wismar at the harbor. And she was just talking about some crowdfunding and I said, oh, crowdfunding is so interesting.

could be good for my podcast and then we started talking and after two minutes she said oh i know a composer tom lane and she's been playing with you in an orchestra in berlin and i love it when the world comes so it starts to be such a tiny place And then I've been doing a little research and I found your Rilke Lieder. Yeah. So how did that come? You wrote the Rilke Lieder, three songs after poems by Rainer Maria Rilke 10 years ago.

Is it connected to your German history or did it just come by some incident? Yeah, well, good question. Yeah, it was 2013 I wrote these and... I have always been interested in leader because when I was still at school I was studying lots of things but I was really interested in music and I thought it might be something I wanted to pursue later and I

was composing but I was also playing the piano and the violin and the viola and also starting to do some singing studies and I was very interested in Lieder, in Schubert Lieder and Schumann Lieder and I've actually found my My original scores, which I have here, sort of Bibles, the leader collections of Schubert and Schumann. And it was something that I...

would play on the piano. This is when I was a teenager, maybe 15, 16 years old. I'd play on the piano and sing a little bit as well. And then I'd sing a little bit with my singing teacher and I'd study those things. And then when I went on to university, I did more singing lessons.

Also at music college, when I was at the Royal Academy of Music in London, I did voice as a second study alongside composition. And I sang a lot in choirs, and I still do that now. And I sing in sort of professional choirs as well. But Lieder was a way for me to really get underneath the skin of the music of these great composers, especially of the 19th century. So the Schubert Lieder and the Schumann Lieder. And because I had a little bit of access to German.

through my mother it was really nice for me to be able to use that language and to really get into the songs because in translation they just they're just not the same and i was i was just always fascinated well the the interaction of the poetry and the music and how that works. And then even from very early on, maybe when I was 16, 17, I started trying to compose my own leader, which is a bit of a strange thing to be doing in the 21st century.

kind of emulating a 19th century form, but because I think they were so close to me because I sang them and played them a lot, I really wanted to try it out myself. So I used some Heine poetry as well, which was obviously very close to... the great leader composers and then I continued that through university and then fast forward to 2013 and I really wanted to to revisit this kind of leader composition and I wanted something a bit more

sort of complex and less structured and less metered than the Heine poetry and Rilke was always a poet I tried to read and understand and he's you know he's a great poet and very very very kind of complex and revered and i discovered this poem

The first one, Andi Musique, so to music. And instantly I was, of course, reminded of the Schubert song, a very famous song, Andi Musique, which is completely different, but... I thought maybe this maybe this Rilke poem is referencing that because it's such a well-known song and poem and then I thought what it's nice it's a nice kind of symmetry as well that you're writing music about music

and then I managed to find then I did a bit of research and I found other other poems by Rilke about music so there's one called just Musik and there's one called Bestürz mich Musik so it's all kind of poetry texts related to music directly which is very I guess self-referential as well and it seemed to make sense to me because I was writing in this form which in itself is

sort of slightly archaic form so it was already the songs were already referencing themselves and then the text was referencing itself and it seemed to make a kind of nice circle and i yeah so then i just went ahead and started composing them And it was great then. I worked with a few different singers who interpreted them. And that's always a really, really great joy. And I worked with a couple of singers in Dublin. I played some of the piano for some of the performances.

A singer in the USA got in touch because she was looking for contemporary songs to add to a recital, because I think sometimes it can be hard.

to find contemporary music to go alongside other other kind of leader and songs exactly and that's also where i started this podcast also for singers who are interested to find to find it because it's not easy to find it because most of the time it just stays somewhere in the in the shoe ladder and the in the drawer of some poets and and and and um her name we are going to listen to the

to the music very soon is Emerald Leslie and she sang it in 2015 at the University of Washington, Seattle and she's also doing a lot of new music and I always say thank you to all. The singers were really interested in new contemporary music and I found it so thrilling that you picked three poems of Rilke about music.

and they are so different and to prepare this podcast i i read a whole dissertation about rilke and music wow yeah okay i should read that too so You can find it in the internet. It's by Herbert Dynard, written in 1959, a dissertation for Yale University. I'm not going to talk too much about it, but what Dynard is saying in his dissertation.

about Rilke and music is that he has a very complex relation to music and the songs you the poems you've picked you can really feel those differences also in every poem that there's a different notion a different relation to music and and rilke in the beginning and you have to see it in a chronological way the way Rilke all his life developed more and more into being more and more interested in music. In the beginning he was an Augenmensch. He was struck by Rodin and Cezanne.

It was always about the shower and the seeing and later on he got an orenmensch, he became an orenmensch and listening and silence was so important for him that he was fighting with all the neighbors who tried to play the piano in the neighborhood. because it was disturbing him. But in the beginning, the only relation to music was when he was young that he had this dust cloth where he had to clean the piano and the piano was humming.

under his hands where he had to clean it in a metallic way so he was really far away from being taught anything about music and and in his poems you feel

You can feel such a development. Many women just took him into concerts and... he was struck by beethoven and then he later on he also saw the magic flute in hamburg so he has a whole all his life was like a you can see like a timeline like a development meant to come closer and close to music and I found it but I find it also very interesting that he was in the beginning he felt that music was just about seduction and

that there was no rational element in it. And when he was with Rodin in Paris, Rodin played him a Gregorianic. choral and he was totally struck by by this um gregorianic chorus so he he learned all his life about music and i picked this first song that you wrote andy music Because I felt there's the highest complexity of what music could be. And a poet saying so much about music that...

You cannot talk about music anyway. I'm trying to talk about music in the podcast, but it's not possible really to talk about it. But Rilke was so, from being completely unalphabet, artist or how you say it and and with music to becoming a friend of a pupil by Busoni and then he was even helping Busoni being published by the Insel Verlag and he got a

a note by busoni into the book so he was getting more and more in contact and deeper and deeper and i feel that in this poem you find the deepest research of what music could be like where the speech ends and an audible landscape or the most beautiful verses when it says another side of the air. How did you feel about this, Tom?

Was it a big field of experience of music coming, evolving inside you when you read all these verses? Yeah, I mean, do you mean the kind of process of turning it from a text into a song?

Yeah, it's always an interesting experience. You start with songs like this. I would generally start with the text and you try to read it and understand it and... partly you're trying to understand something just about the rhythm and the emphasis of the words but then of course also about the meaning and the kind of images within the text I tend to then really

use the individual lines to shape melodies. I'd always start with the voice part and see what I can sort of bring out and how can I set the lines to music.

in the clearest way and the way that expresses the poetry the best way in my opinion and maybe other composers do it differently but that's the way I usually start and then it's a kind of process of starting with a few small lines and trying some different harmonies with those lines and then maybe expanding the song and then maybe adding an introduction so in in this in this song and the music there is a kind of piano introduction which is

also a very common thing in in a lot of 19th century leader and I wanted it to really express the images that we hear at the beginning of the text, where it's talking about, you know, the breadth of statues and the silence of pictures and paintings and sort of an inexpressible meaning.

So for me that represented a sort of expansive sound and sort of a mysterious expansive sound and I did my best to create something like that with the piano because... it's obviously just one instrument but of course the piano has such a beautiful big range and it's a resonant and you have all these many many strings which when you play one note

and you lift the pedal and lots of other strings resonate. So for me, that was that kind of resonating space really represented these images of... emptiness but things filling emptiness but uh a kind of ringing and a resonance filling that emptiness and disappearing again so you where you'll hear the um the introduction that has these sort of has a very low note and very high notes and it's sort of

explores that big resonant space. I guess it's like the piano is a big resonant box and it's creating a resonant world and that's what I'm trying to do with the introduction and then the voice kind of comes in and almost fills out that resonance with a more tangible melody and ideally there is this lovely effect with the piano that when you

sing or play other instruments into an open piano, especially a grand piano, when the pedal is down, the sustain pedal. The strings can then be made to ring as well, sort of like a reverb or extended resonance. So that was kind of the idea then that the voice was coming in and continuing the reverberation of the piano strings.

and then then it moves into a more active section which is more kind of reminiscent of a traditional accompaniment with with a voice part this is so interesting tom because i i really feel that the more i listen to your song the more i admire it because it's um it is really the way You come from stillness and space. And in the beginning, in the introduction, I feel this, also this, it is some kind of vertical space for me. I can't explain why.

that's that opens up in the beginning such a such a huge space and then suddenly the voice goes into more movement that could be like operatic you know like and like uh and uh goes more and more into singing alive into the horizontal space i don't know and then you come back to the to the beginning with the vertical structure with this introduction with this big space as you say but i i felt there was some kind of vertical quality in it and and this is um

In German we say, it's so gelungen. Achieved. Yeah. Yeah, that's great. Well, I think I was, I'm trying to think back, it was...

10 or 12 years ago now but i think what i was trying to achieve was at the beginning of the poem that is describing these sort of very huge large concepts and then in the second section of the the kind of second paragraph of the poem where I've said it's more movement, it's talking maybe more about emotions and tangible, emotions sort of more tangible than abstract images.

So it goes into this more expressive song-like quality to express that. But also, I mean, from a purely sort of dramaturgical or compositional perspective, trying to give variety within one song.

um so that in theory this song could be sort of very short standalone piece and i think this is also the first song i wrote of of these ones and i didn't think it would be a collection and it could also just be a single song so it's just just a kind of habit of mine to try and have interest and not always just kind of

language in a static space. And if you have one thing, then try and contrast it with a different thing. And then a nice, neat sort of ABA structure. Yeah, exactly. Which is, I guess, it's just my kind of... habits as a composer and trying to kind of create something satisfying and create a journey within the musical experience.

which is maybe also from my experience of theatre as well, that there is this kind of narrative and dramaturgical structure within music. I tend to like to have satisfying... And complete structures. Yeah. And you also have it in Bestürz mich Musik in the third song. There's very eruptive rhythms. And I really like that you positioned.

and the music in the beginning of the song cycle and in the end so and this the second song is one of his very late poems you know and and so it's not chronological but the dramaturgy is is working very well that's good yeah shall we have a listen to it oh yeah This was Andi Musik by Tom Lane after a poem by Rainer Maria Rilke. The soprano was Emerald Leslie and on the piano Andrew Romanek.

The live recording was 2015 in the University of Washington in Seattle. Now I'm going to read the lyrics. Andi Musik by Rainer Maria Rilke Musik, Atem der Statuen, vielleicht, Stille der Bilder, du Sprache, wo Sprachen enden, du Zeit, die senkrecht steht.

auf der richtung vergehender herzen gefühle zu wem o du der gefühle wandlung in was in hörbare landschaft du fremde musik du uns entwachsener herzraum innigstes unser das uns übersteigend hinausdrängt heiliger abschied da uns das Innere umsteht als geübteste Ferne, als andere Seite der Luft, rein riesig, nicht mehr bewohnbar.

So this week we celebrate Rilke's 150th birthday. Thank you and happy birthday, Rainer Maria Rilke. Yes, Tom, it's... so wonderful to discover contemporary art song and to see what composers are doing with poems and i mean rilke many composers took him and many composers

even when he was alive he said oh no no it seems that everybody is allowed to to set my poems into music so hey he he liked leader As I found out that he always accepted the art form of lead, but when there was a recitation of his cornet, he was really... not very happy with it because it was spoken word and monodrum it was performed as a monodrum with spoken word and music no musical line no melody and so he wasn't always happy with

the way his poetry was set into music but even in his lifetime there were many composers taking his poems already and i would say we could there could be a book about only about all the composers, the contemporary composers who've been taking Röke poems and you could make a whole book about it and then see the different Lieder that have been written after his poetry. Yeah, that sounds great.

Yeah. And it's so interesting because in the beginning he was even denying music. Do you feel when you've been composing, did you feel this? I would say a bipolar. You say bipolar? Somebody who is a bit manic, depressive, and one time he's totally happy, and the next day could be completely different. did you have the split feeling when you were composing the music about about rilke yeah i mean uh i didn't know is that is that is there a theory that he was maybe

There is some kind of theory about... He was even recommended to meet Freud, but in the end, as I read, they never met. When I read his poetry, I feel there's some struggle inside him and it could change from here to there very quickly. So I had this idea maybe he was a bit bipolar. but uh did you did you have this feeling of a like two hearts drugging inside him i mean i didn't i didn't myself i mean um i guess my

Maybe just a different relationship to the text and to text in general, maybe to you as well. And I come from because I come from such a musical background rather than a literature or text background. So I maybe approach the text in a different way and I maybe... seeing different things in it and maybe i'm quite utilitarian when i'm kind of going through it and looking for the the kind of um rhythms and and and emphases of the of the text and

Maybe I'm not seeing as many layers to the content of the piece, but that's really interesting to hear that. I'm always fascinated to hear how different people experience different art forms and different things.

And even in music that I've written, some people will hear things that I never thought about that were inside. And I guess that's the really exciting thing, isn't it? That people have those different experiences. Yeah. And how is it that, do you feel that... if as you've been writing a lot for for dance companies and actors do you feel that it helped your way of composition that you were very connected to the human performers you know like i always feel it's always good because it makes very

strong and very reduced because they you have to make choices especially when somebody's dancing for it do you feel that it helps you to express especially lead and is there a difference when you do some sound design so i also found that you've been composing just a wonderful piece i have to read it it's called beats bells and bridges i found it and you composed for the midsummer festival in cork with bells and in nature and there's also a piece

called biosphere 2020 with solo horn beach and sea that has been performed at the beach of dublin so your ranges you can also you also make experience with sounds of nature and instruments so how is it when you compose do you feel it's good to integrate both Does it help you to work directly with actors or singers? Yeah. For me personally, I like to work on a variety of different types of projects.

I think other people might want to focus more on individual things. It's maybe just the kind of personality I am that I like to maybe focus on one thing, but not for too long. And then I can move on to something else and then we come back to the other thing. It's maybe just a personal quirk of mine. But in terms of...

theatre and drama. I've always been very interested in opera, partly because of singing different arias and things, but also I just love watching it and experiencing it. And I always wanted to... compose it and I've been lucky enough to write a few short opera pieces and I was always interested in how to make opera more dramatic and more theatrical which is I think

I think that's been a preoccupation of composers since opera was invented. How can we integrate music and theatre more closely, just like the Greeks did and, you know, in the Renaissance, how that started and how just like Wagner and Mozart and all these great composers.

And my approach, I guess, was to learn more about theatre and drama and text-based forms and to understand those dramaturgical structures and how these... incredible actors can express things so effortlessly which they can sometimes it's it's easier to express things without music and sometimes there's other times when you need the music and try and understand this kind of interface between

text and music which are so so different and so opposite in many ways but then when you can bring them together and create something really interesting as well so i've always yeah i've just kind of been interested in all the different forms that that can take and dance is one of those things and dance is on the other side of that argument very interesting because it often has no text and you can also add text to it as well but often it's really textless and it's narrativeless.

and you can invent narratives or you can just not be concerned with those narratives dance sometimes for me it represents sort of like a like a visual music because you're seeing those people move through the space and you don't need to be concerned with exact meanings and pinpointing things into words which is what I love about music as well and it's a different

part of your brain it's a bit of a different experience but on the other hand it's very very interesting as well when you combine other dramatic elements with that and things like physical theater which is like the piece you mentioned with Hannes Langolf In that piece, in Tata Tria, it had a combination of text, a combination of theatrical scenes and movement and music and sound design, a real kind of swirling mix of everything.

and that's fascinating too and it's often those moments when someone's dancing without music and the music begins or someone is dancing and some text begins or some text is joined by something and those kind of little interfaces where different forms of expression meet and fuse and combine. So I guess I'm just fascinated by all the different possibilities of using music and using sound and listening.

to create new and interesting things and I find them all very interesting and even if it's just music for a very short video piece or it's some very very simple sound design of weather sounds or rain how can that influence a scene um or yeah that's what i wanted to ask you like is it that when you do the sound design or like pieces like

the biosphere 2020 out on the beach of dublin was that just was a cornered solo and the sea and the sound of the sea is it that you feel that you find your own colors you'll find new aspects of colors and i always feel like when when you feel music is like painting or like when it becomes visual you know and then when you bring your colors to to leader That is different because you work differently with the words because you've got a big spectrum of colors already and you're not...

You can be very close to the words, but you're not, how you say, uphanging. You're not too directly linked to the words. So you can open. Sometimes compositions can open up. the the poems and words as well right yeah yeah i mean it's it's another it's a very interesting um area as well and i mean i've i've also i've been lucky enough to work with contemporary uh living poets as well like

There's an Irish poet I've worked with here called Jessica Traynor, and we tend to work in a similar way that she would create the poetry first and then I send it to music, but then I can also go back to her and ask her questions about it.

play her versions of it and she can come back with feedback and then i can yeah try and try and bring a new understanding to that poetry yeah and it can be heard in a different way and experienced in a different way there was a project called the wanderer with jessica trainer in 2022 at cork opera house with irish modern dance theater and it was a bit close to and inspired by schubert's winterreise

And it was about movement and migration. Yeah, I mean, that's an example that was really bringing together so many different things because it was commissioned by a choreographer called John Scott. And he himself is also a singer and an operatic tenor. but also creates very avant-garde and, I don't know, radical dance pieces as well. So it was a natural step then to create some sort of operatic sung music to go with this kind of choreography.

and the idea was about migration and movement and wandering and that for me then instantly reminded me of Winterreise and the kind of romantic sense of wandering and walking and Winterreise was a kind of great expression of that and so what I did for that is I just kind of wove very very subtle and almost hidden

references to different songs in Winterreise, which if you weren't looking for them, you wouldn't hear them. One idea originally was to intersperse it with some of the original songs, but in the end, it was enough just to have the new music.

that was great because i really got to bring in all those different things that the kind of experience as a younger person of the the german romantic leader and then the more contemporary poetry and contemporary music and then also with the choreography and the dance and that was a great experience which we we kind of created during the COVID pandemic as well and it was then just at the very end of that that time that we performed it.

And it was a great experience to bring it all together. And hopefully we'll have the chance to do it again sometime. Oh, Tom, it was so nice to have you here. And I'm so happy that I could have discovered your three Rilke songs. I hope that many singers will discover them, maybe through the podcast. That would be great. It's a wonderful song cycle. It makes just sense. I would just say it just makes sense. I would say it has a validity or how you say that it feels.

right and um there's so many beautiful aspects also in the piano great thank you thanks yes thank you for for being my guest today no problem thank you very much This was Lead Can Fly with Tom Lane. Thank you for listening and hope you join us next time. If you want to support the podcast, you can become a Steady member on the Steady website. Just put in Liedkern Fly or Liederkern in Fliegen.

and for a little bit of money in the month you get an early access to all the episodes some extra information and i will be just happy to have you there