Fred Hersch's Leaves of Grass

Sometimes it’s nice to be able to collaborate with your lyricist; maybe they can tweak a syllable here and there to make the phrase fit in more musically. But what if your lyricist has been dead so long that his published work is all in the public domain?

Such is the situation Fred Hersch faced when he set out to create a hybrid jazz ensemble/chamber music setting of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. This timeless collection of poems had a profound effect on Fred early on in life, and since he had always enjoyed composing songs, it seemed like a natural thing to do. But the scope of this work exceeded anything that he’d done before, and pulling it off involved some very interesting approaches. And he had a big book to read. . . .

Music from Words
“I wanted to create an emotional experience for the listener,” says Fred, “and that comes from the words. So that’s where I started. I used the so-called ‘deathbed’ edition, which is considered to be the most complete. I read it cover to cover, and marked the sections that — quite simply — just did something to me. It was very idiosyncratic.”

As he scribbled in the margins, Fred envisioned how each line would sound when delivered by his amazing vocalists: Kate McGarry and Kurt Elling. “There are a lot of sections that use archaic language that would be difficult for someone of even Kurt or Kate’s caliber to sing convincingly,” he says. “So I knew I wasn’t going to use any of the poems about the Civil War.”

While at a residency at the Banff Center for the Performing Arts in Alberta, Canada, Fred typed up all the bits he’d selected, printed it all out, cut it all up, and spread it out all over the floor of his cabin. “I just started rearranging things,” he says. “I knew I wanted to end with ‘Song of Myself,’ and I knew that there would be an instrumental overture. I also didn’t want to eliminate lines, but I had to distill things. There is a lot of verbiage in Whitman’s work, and you have to wade through a lot of self-indulgent stuff to get to the really amazing things. So I did that for three weeks and made myself nuts.”

Fred got around this roadblock by enlisting the help of Herschel Garfein, a well-known librettist and playwright, to help him refine the overall form. “Herchel presented me with a shape,” says Fred, “and though I didn’t agree with all his suggestions, it made it easier for me to make the final decisions. I didn’t want to do a Whitman’s Greatest Hits, but I was still concerned about leaving too much out. But the feedback I got from poets who heard the piece was that I didn’t reach for too much — and that was a good thing.”

Once he had a clearer idea of the form, Fred began to compose, but not at the piano. “Most poetry is meant to be spoken,” he continues. “There is a musicality to the way certain poets write. I let each line kind of take me where it wanted. Sometimes an internal rhythm in the poetry would dictate a groove. But I wouldn’t go to the piano, I’d just sing the line over and over. Then maybe I’d go to the piano and scribble the phrase down on manuscript paper.

“I very rarely started from a chord progression. Nor did I start with pure melody. I had these syllables to work with instead. And I followed some great advice I got years ago when writing for vocalists. Keep your melody within the staff. Otherwise you won’t hear the text, it’ll become all tone, or all vowel, when the melody goes above the staff. Plus, I went with jazz singers, because there’s something great about their more natural delivery and inflection.”

Poetry from Instruments
Though the instrumentation is for a small jazz ensemble (see Supporting Cast) Fred envisioned a chamber ensemble that would use moments of improvisation to interpret the words, as opposed to the common melody/solo after solo/melody approach. “In this band,” he says, “everyone’s a leader in their own right. They’re incredibly experienced and talented. I was very self-conscious about having them just play whole notes, even when I really felt that for the words at that moment, that was the right thing to do. But they said, ‘You know, when you’re playing with horn players of this caliber, it’s enough to just resonate with them.’ They all said this one part where they play moving, out-there chorale chords was their favorite place to play. They felt like it was a moment where they could support the soloist and act as one.

“In all, it was nine months of libretto work, three and a half weeks of composition, three weeks of orchestration, and ten days to hand copy the parts. The longest chunk was definitely all about putting which poems in what order. This is definitely a Fred piece, for better or worse. I don’t think too many other people would come up with such a hybrid!”