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Life in Avondall
2012

mezzo-soprano
flute doubling alto flute 
clarinet doubling clarinet in A 
horn
piano
percussion 
  maracas, newspaper, pad, paper sheet, pot, ricciane, stones, slapstick, sistrum,
  medium suspended cymbal, small tam-tam, tambourine, triangle, wind gong, woodblock 
violin
cello

duration 30' 

first performance: 
Janna Baty with Collage New Music, cond. David Hoos
Pickman Hall, The Longy School of Music / February 5, 2012

RECORDING—first performance: 


SCORE
The Hound of Ulster
In My Dreams
Little Boy Lost
Avondall
The Castle
The River God
Not Waving but Drowning
The Singing Cat
The Fórlorn Sea
Tenuous and Precarious

PROGRAM NOTE
Life in Avondall sets ten poems by the British poet Stevie Smith (1902–1971). Her poetry often deals with parting or death but in a peculiarly light manner. The surface is often very simple – almost nursery-rhyme like while the subject matter can be bleak and eerie.

My settings are as straightforward as the poetry demands. Each is built around one of three very similar groups of three chords (a seventh chord, a triad, and a diad); one set for poems about animals, one for poems about dreaming, one for poems about water, and one for poems set in a fairytale landscape. These chords play out in various fairly undeveloped ways and in most cases they appear baldly as an introduction to each song.

Each of these poems also has a sting of some sort either in the opening or the closing stanza. These ‘stings’ are set against noise: air sounds, clicks, tapping, scraping.

Stevie Smith conveys, for me, a very familiar (and disheartening) sort of English ennui – a sense of being held in by propriety, by the mores and expectations of post-war suburbia, grey weather, heavy woolen clothes, drab surroundings. Stevie Smith lived her adult life with her aunt, working as a secretary to a publishing company. She and her aunt lived in a redbrick semi-detached row house on Avondale Street in Palmers Green. Thus the title of my piece: Stevie Smith’s strange poems issue from an interior ‘Avondall'—a heightened and clarified version of her room on Avondale street.

My thanks to Ethan Parcell, whose I Want You To Know That Today Is His Birthday recorded by The World Without Parking Lots provides the germ of the musical cell that underlies each of these ten songs. 

REVIEW
At Collage New Music, composer Andy Vores, Boston Conservatory’s chair of composition, and a brilliant setter of modern poetry, added a new poet to his estimable repertoire in Life in Avondall, 10 poems by the mysteriously gnomic Stevie Smith (whom Glenda Jackson played in the movie Stevie). These delicately tricky, mostly tonal settings (seventh chords, triads, and diads), were an utter joy, sparely capturing the simultaneously childlike and sinister sides of the poems (“I was much further out than you thought,” Smith writes in her most famous poem, “And not waving but drowning”). Mezzo soprano Jana Baty, in fine vocal fettle, got them and sold them, as did the brilliant and intricate ensemble of strings, winds, and percussion.
Lloyd Schwartz • The Boston Phoenix 


TEXTS
The Hound of Ulster
Little boy
Will you stop
And take a look
In the puppy shop -
Dogs blue and liver
Noses aquiver
Little dogs big dogs
Dogs for sport and pleasure
Fat dogs meager dogs
Dogs for lap and leisure
Do you see that wire-haired terrier?
Could anything be merrier?
Do you see that Labrador retriever?
His name is Belvoir.
Thank you courteous stranger, said the child.
By your words I am beguiled,
But tell me I pray
What lurks in the gray
Cold shadows at the back of the shop?
Little boy do not stop
Come away
From the puppy shop.
For the Hound of Ulster lies tethered there
Cuchulain tethered by his golden hair
His eyes are closed and his lips are pale
Hurry little boy he is not for sale. 


In My Dreams
In my dreams I am always saying goodbye and riding away.
Whither and why I know not nor do I care.
And the parting is sweet and the parting over is sweeter,
And sweetest of all is the night and the rushing air. 

In my dreams they are always waving their hands and saying goodbye.
And they give me the stirrup cup and I smile as I drink,
I am glad the journey is set, I am glad I am going,
I am glad, I am glad, that my friends don't know what I think. 


Little Boy Lost
The wood was rather old and dark
The witch was very ugly
And if it hadn't been for father
Walking there so smugly
I never should have followed
The beckoning of her finger.
Ah me how long ago it was
And still I linger
Under the ever interlacing beeches
Over a carpet of moss
I lift my hand but it never reaches
To where the breezes toss
The sun-kissed leaves above.
The sun?
Beware.
The sun never comes here.
Round about and round I go
Up and down and to and fro
The woodlouse hops upon a tree
Or should do but I really cannot see.
Happy fellow. Why can't I be
Happy as he?
The wood grows darker every day
It's not a bad place in a way
But I lost the way
Last Tuesday
Did I love my father, mother, home?
Not very much; but now they're gone
I think of them with kindly toleration
Bred inevitably of separation.
Really if I could find some food
I should be happy enough in this wood
But darker days and hungrier I must spend
Till hunger and darkness make an end. 


Avondall
I had a dream I was a bird
A bird of Avondall
Sitting with birds upon a roof
To swoop and swing and call
I was athirst with other birds
To swoop and swing and call
But no bird turned to me in love
All were inimical,
They were inimical. 


The Castle
I married the Earl of Egremont,
I never saw him by day,
I had him in bed at night,
And cuddled him tight. 

We had two boys, twins,
Tommy and Roly,
Roly was so fat
We called him Roly-poly. 

Oh that was a romantic time,
The castle had such a lonely look,
The estate,
Heavy with cockle and spurge,
Lay desolate. 

The ocean waves
Lapped in the castle caves. 

Oh I love the ramshackle castle,
And the room
Where our sons were born. 

Oh I love the wild
Parkland,
The mild
Sunshine. 

Underneath the wall
Sleeps our pet toad,
There the hollyhocks grow tall. 

My children never saw their father,
Do not know,
He sleeps in my arms each night
Till cockcrow. 

Oh I love the ramshackle castle,
And the turret room
Where our sons were born. 


The River God
I may be smelly, and I may be old,
Rough in my pebbles, reedy in my pools,
But where my fish float by I bless their swimming
And I like the people to bathe in me, especially women.
But I can drown the fools
Who bathe too close to the weir, contrary to rules.
And they take their time drowning
As I throw them up now and then in a spirit of clowning.
Hi yih, yippity-yap, merrily I flow,
O I may be an old foul river but I have plenty of go.
Once there was a lady who was too bold
She bathed in me by the tall black cliff where the water runs cold,
So I brought her down here
To be my beautiful dear.
Oh will she stay with me will she stay
This beautiful lady, or will she go away?
She lies in my beautiful deep river bed with many a weed
To hold her, and many a waving reed.
Oh who would guess what a beautiful white face lies there
Waiting for me to smooth and wash away the fear
She looks at me with. Hi yih, do not let her
Go. There is no one on earth who does not forget her
Now. They say I am a foolish old smelly river
But they do not know of my wide original bed
Where the lady waits, with her golden sleepy head.
If she wishes to go I will not forgive her. 


Not Waving but Drowning
Nobody heard him, the dead man,
But still he lay moaning:
I was much further out than you thought
And not waving but drowning. 

Poor chap, he always loved larking
And now he's dead
It must have been too cold for him his heart gave way,
They said. 

Oh, no no no, it was too cold always
(Still the dead one lay moaning)
I was much too far out all my life
And not waving but drowning. 


The Singing Cat
It was a little captive cat
Upon a crowded train
His mistress takes him from his box
To ease his fretful pain. 

She holds him tight upon her knee
The graceful animal
And all the people look at him
He is so beautiful. 

But oh he pricks and oh he prods
And turns upon her knee
Then lifteth up his innocent voice
In plaintive melody. 

He lifteth up his innocent voice 
He lifteth up, he singeth
And to each human countenance
A smile of grace he bringeth. 

He lifteth up his innocent paw
Upon her breast he clingeth
And everybody cries, Behold
The cat, the cat that singeth. 

He lifteth up his innocent voice
He lifteth up, he singeth
And all the people warm themselves
In the love his beauty bringeth. 


The Fórlorn Sea
Our Princess married
A fairy King.
It was a sensational
Wedding. 

Now they live in a palace
Of porphyry,
Far, far away,
By the fórlorn sea. 

Sometimes people visit them,
Last week they invited me;
That is how I can tell you
They live by a fórlorn sea. 

(They said: Here's a magic carpet,
Come on this,
And when you arrive
We will give you a big kiss.) 

I play in the palace garden,
I climb the sycamore tree,
Sometimes I swim
In the fórlorn sea. 

The King and the Princess are shadowy,
Yet beautiful,
They are waited on by white cats,
Who are dutiful. 

It is like a dream
When they kiss and cuddle me,
But I like it, I like it,
I do not wish to break free. 

So I eat all they give me
Because I have read
If you eat fairy food
You will never wake up in your own bed, 

But will go on living,
As has happened to me,
Far, far away
By a fórlorn sea. 


Tenuous and Precarious
Tenuous and Precarious
Were my guardians,
Precarious and Tenuous,
Two Romans. 

My father was Hazardous,
Hazardous,
Dear old man,
Three Romans. 

There was my brother Spurious,
Spurious posthumous,
Spurious was spurious
Was four Romans. 

My husband was Perfidious,
He was perfidious,
Five Romans. 

Surreptitious, our son,
Was surreptitious,
He was six Romans. 

Our cat Tedious
Still lives,
Count not Tedious
Yet. 

My name is Finis,
Finis, Finis,
I am Finis,
Six, five, four, three, two,
One Roman,
Finis. 

Stevie Smith (1902–1971)