DESCRIPTION:
From the program "I Sing the Body Electric: Walt Whitman & The Beat Generation. August 1, 2014. Presented by The Queer Arts Festival, Vancouver, BC.

Music by Ben Schuman
Poem by Walt Whitman

Peter Alexander, baritone
William George, tenor
Cicely Nelson, violin
Mark Haney, double bass
Michael Park, piano

Part One: Walt Whitman -
After a tender introduction (For the one I love), we begin a love story. Two men meet, filled with lust that blooms into love (3 Calamus Songs). Suddenly, they are divided by war, and one of the lovers falls (Beat! Beat! Drums!). An angel entreats the moon to look over the wounded soldier (Look down fair moon). Eventually they are reunited on the battlefield, just in time for one lover to die in the arms of the other (Vigil strange I kept on the field one night).

BEN SCHUMAN (MM-Peabody Conservatory) spent some quality time as a tenor on the opera stage before chucking it all and becoming a lawyer. During graduate school, he studied composition with Robert Sirota of the Peabody Conservatory and the Manhattan School of Music, and has since composed dozens of songs and choral pieces on poetry by Edith Sitwell, Joy Harjo, Margaret Atwood, Sylvia Plath, and Dylan Thomas, among others, as well as pieces for string quartet, wind quintet, and orchestra. Ben hopes to write an opera when he can find the time.

Composer’s Note: My settings of Walt Whitman’s Not heat flames up and consumes and Passing stranger draw inspiration from the anxiety and uncertainty in each poem, no doubt the result of Whitman’s own ambivalent sexuality (“You grew up with me / were a boy with me / or a girl with me”). This anxiety is represented in each piece by a near-unrelenting rhythmic ostinato -- a steady counter-melody in the double-bass in “Not heat flames” and a repeated almost-dissonant progression in the piano in “Passing stranger” -- contrasted with the melancholy lyricism of the voice. In each piece, private desire swells to a climax of frustration and longing before receding, unmet. Love is requited in the duet We two boys, where male love is expressed through the context of boyhood play, musically represented by a lilting, playful motive that nearly becomes overwhelmed by masculine energy before uniting the two boys at last.

To A Stranger (from Calamus Poems)

Passing stranger! you do not know how longingly I look upon you,
You must be he I was seeking, or she I was seeking, (it comes to me, as of a dream,)
I have somewhere surely lived a life of joy with you,
All is recall’d as we flit by each other, fluid, affectionate, chaste, matured,
You grew up with me, were a boy with me, or a girl with me,
I ate with you, and slept with you—your body has become not yours only, nor left my body mine only,
You give me the pleasure of your eyes, face, flesh, as we pass—you take of my beard, breast, hands, in return,
I am not to speak to you—I am to think of you when I sit alone, or wake at night alone,
I am to wait—I do not doubt I am to meet you again,
I am to see to it that I do not lose you.

Not Heat Flames Up and Consumes (from Calamus Poems)

Not heat flames up and consumes,
Not sea-waves hurry in and out,
Not the air delicious and dry, the air of ripe summer, bears lightly along white down-balls of myriads of seeds,
Waited, sailing gracefully, to drop where they may;
Not these, O none of these more than the flames of me, consuming, burning for his love whom I love,
O none more than I hurrying in and out;
Does the tide hurry, seeking something, and never give up? O I the same,
O nor down-balls nor perfumes, nor the high rain-emitting clouds,
are borne through the open air,
Any more than my soul is borne through the open air,
Wafted in all directions O love, for friendship, for you.

We Two Boys Together Clinging (from Calamus Poems)

We two boys together clinging,
One the other never leaving,
Up and down the roads going, North and South excursions making, Power enjoying, elbows stretching, fingers clutching,
Arm’d and fearless, eating, drinking, sleeping, loving.
No law less than ourselves owning, sailing, soldiering, thieving, threatening,
Misers, menials, priests alarming, air breathing, water drinking, on
the turf or the sea-beach dancing,
Cities wrenching, ease scorning, statutes mocking, feebleness chasing,
Fulfilling our foray.