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A Supermarket in California: a nocturnal passacaglia
2013
baritone
string quartet
duration 10'
first performance:
David Kravitz with the Arneis Quartet
The Harvard Faculty Club / Cambridge / December 10, 2013
RECORDING
available at www//andyvores.bandcamp.com
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PROGRAM NOTE
This work was written as a companion piece for a performance of Lee Hyla's setting of Allen Ginsberg's Howl and Charles Fussell's setting of Walt Whitman's Being Music. This poem brings these two poets together in a meditation on American life and mortality. My setting is a passacaglia unerpinning the vocal line that opens with long spaces between the phrases. These spaces get shorter and shorter until the passacaglia becomes a continuous line. The vocal line comes from this same passacaglia but here it 'catches' in places and circles around the same little group of pitches before continuing on. Closing down the sections of text are little cadences drawn from works of Ockeghem. This for two reasons: Ockeghem stood, as "bon père" to the younger Dufay in a similar manner as Whitman stands to Ginsberg, and a passacaglia is essentially a cantus firmus and is here used in a manner somewhat reminiscent of early renaissance composers, such as Ockeghem.
TEXT
A Supermarket in California
What thoughts I have of you tonight, Walt Whitman, for
I walked down the sidestreets under the trees with a headache
self-conscious looking at the full moon.
In my hungry fatigue, and shopping for images, I went
into the neon fruit supermarket, dreaming of your enumerations!
What peaches and what penumbras! Whole families
shopping at night! Aisles full of husbands! Wives in the
avocados, babies in the tomatoes! — and you, Garcia Lorca, what
were you doing down by the watermelons?
I saw you, Walt Whitman, childless, lonely old grubber,
poking among the meats in the refrigerator and eyeing the grocery
boys.
I heard you asking questions of each: Who killed the
pork chops? What price bananas? Are you my Angel?
I wandered in and out of the brilliant stacks of cans
following you, and followed in my imagination by the store
detective.
We strode down the open corridors together in our
solitary fancy tasting artichokes, possessing every frozen
delicacy, and never passing the cashier.
Where are we going, Walt Whitman? The doors close in
an hour. Which way does your beard point tonight?
(I touch your book and dream of our odyssey in the
supermarket and feel absurd.)
Will we walk all night through solitary streets? The
trees will add shade to shade, lights out in the houses, we'll both be
lonely.
Will we stroll dreaming of the lost America of love
past blue automobiles in driveways, home to our silent cottage?
Ah, dear father, graybeard, lonely old courage-teacher,
what America did you have when Charon quit poling his ferry and
you got out on a smoking bank and stood watching the boat
disappear on the black waters of Lethe?
Allen Ginsberg (1926–1997)