Poetry, Lyrics and Music: Meditations and Concerns - by Lara Solnicki

Greetings, and welcome to my first blog contribution! 

I'm so pleased to have the Inner Circle Music blog as a platform for provocative conversation, and hopefully interactions on the subject of thoughtful music, perceptions of art as well as meditations on life as an artist in 2015. I'd love to hear from readers, and most especially from my fellow label mates, living around the world where tastes and trends will likely differ vastly! Please do feel free to chime in and agree, or challenge my ideas! Expect my usual exaggerated rants and flair for the dramatic! (Not very Canadian, I know!)

For those who don’t know me: I grew up in Toronto, Canada with a filmmaker father and high school English teacher/writer mother. My parents listened to classical music and opera, but not really much other music. My maternal grandmother was a pianist from a family of musicians−  her sister the renowned Canadian pianist Beth Lipkin. By the time I was in nursery school (3 or 4) I was obsessed with Tchaikovsky’s dying swan. My path to jazz was circuitous: I graduated in 2004 from the Glenn Gould School/Royal Conservatory of Music in Toronto, with a BA, Performance Diploma and half of an Artist Diploma in Classical singing and opera, and a minor in piano, before taking on a second art writing poetry in 2004. I ultimately moved into jazz and creative music in 2008, and began performing it in 2010.

The Dynamic Relationship Between Text and Music

This August 2015, I completed an experimental song cycle called "The One and the Other" with the generous support of a Toronto Arts Council Music Creation Grant. It was my first combining my experiences in poetry, as essentially equal to music in a musical setting.  The repertoire ranges from pure music with no lyrics (vocalise) to recited poetry with program music and includes several songs that actually combine recited and sung poetry. It’s been an amazing and challenging exploration, and the beginning of much more to come. 

Less interested in achieving polish, I was interested in exploring what I have come to perceive as an inherent struggle between text and music, where one leads and one follows. Setting poems really belongs to the classical tradition, not jazz at all. The language of jazz and popular music is essentially colloquial, and listeners are used to its informality. There’s no real reason or rule about this. Poetry belongs to a different tradition than music lyrics, and is denser and requires more concentration. When we expect an audience to perceive the text as poetry, we expect them to invest more into it because we are dealing with a cryptic art form where words are not taken at face value, and suddenly there are new considerations, like complex figurative language and oblique references to artistic movements− and how these considerations are contributing to the overall message of the poem, and also in this case− the music!

There’s really a lot to talk about (and work with) here; I’m not talking about poetic lyrics (Joni Mitchell, Bob Dylan etc.) When we are talking about poetry in music, one example would be in our interpretations of rhyming texts: if it’s a contemporary poem that uses rhyme, chances are it’s referencing the past for some reason, that reference contributing to the overall meaning of the song!  

These are aesthetic issues, but on another level, something that is glaring, and quite frankly concerns me, is that the unapologetic rawness of expression that has long been in poetry since the mid-twentieth century (let’s not even talk about visual art here), is not being matched in lyrics and musical texts, particularly in jazz. In the nineteen fifties, there was a kind of revolution in English language poetry, what’s known as The American Confessional movement. These writers wrote about taboo subjects. They were dark, and fascinating. Don’t be fooled by the name confessional, they had plenty of style and skill. The poems were elegant but the subject matter was unromantic. We owe a lot to these writers, particularly women. It’s unspoken and understood that contemporary poetry will bear the mark of the Confessional movement among others. But I’m afraid we cannot say the same with lyrics. 

To give this more historical context: George Trakl one hundred years ago described a landscape smelling of mold and decayed vegetation; to read Paul Celan (1920-1970) is to read a poet who never even utters his personal story of tragedy but all of his artistic choices themselves are soaked in this loss! This applies to exuberant writers too! Check out the Surrealists! My point here is that no matter what poets are writing about, they are expected to write from a very rich, honest and interior place. 

What I hear most often about lyrics are “lovely lyrics” or “beautiful”. I’m afraid such responses do not reflect much of the entire spectrum of human emotion and experience! Poetry does not have the luxury to hide behind beautiful sound. It’s naked in its intellectual, imaginative and emotional presence, so we have come to expect more from it than we do from lyrics. I think this is wrong.

To be blunt, until we raise the bar here, where with musical texts, people are actually expected to show more of their skin, their minds, reference tradition, and take RISKS, lyrics will remain stuck in mostly clichéd language and subject matter. It will not evolve.