last things, I think, to think about (review)

The poetry of John Ashbery has been the subject of several musical settings and has inspired a variety of creative and innovative compositional responses. Notable among these is Roger Reynolds's last things, I think, to think about (1994), now available on a new CD from Electronic Music Foundation. Mr. Reynolds's last things is a 70-min song cycle consisting of ten of Mr. Ashbery's poems, all linked together by a spatialized recording of Mr. Ashbery himself reading an eleventh piece, a prose-poem, "Debit Night," which was, in fact, commissioned for this collaboration. The poet's reading of "Debit Night" begins the cycle and resurfaces at various times over the course of the work. The other ten songs are interspersed throughout the composition, continually interrupting the reading of "Debit Night."

Such a multi-textual formal design echoes another notable Ashbery setting, Elliott Carter's well known Syringa. Whereas Mr. Carter combines fragments of Greek texts with an Ashbery poem, Mr. Reynolds combines a variety of Ashbery poems drawn from over four decades of the poet's career. During a recent poetry reading at the University of Maryland, Mr. Ashbery wryly mentioned that a number of his collaborators were only interested in his earlier work. In contrast to this, Mr. Reynolds's composition uses texts that are drawn from both older and more recent material. The arrangement of these poems—largely Mr. Reynolds's doing—creates a uniquely multi-layered form, drifting between country and city settings, historical and contemporary imagery, all the time ruminating on the process of creation from a series of very different perspectives.

To set this winding textual path the composer traverses a number of musical styles and techniques equal to these manifold perspectives.

Along the way, Mr. Reynolds affords the performers, baritone Philip Larson and pianist Aleck Karis, ample opportunity to demonstrate their remarkable skills as they realize his demanding score filled with numerous shifting musical surfaces. This approach should not be surprising; the composer has found inspiration in John Ashbery's work before, and about his Pulitzer Prize–winning Whispers Out of Time, he has said:

In "Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror" John Ashbery repeatedly employs images involving a back and forth movement in space, and in time . . . this aperiodic fluctuation of perspective, felt in different ways, seemed to me so fundamental a matter in the affective impact of the poem that I decided that the form of my musical response must be infused with the same phenomenon.

(Form and Method, Amsterdam: Harwood Academic Press, 2000, p. 71)

These attributes of Mr. Ashbery's work to which Mr. Reynolds alludes are amplified in last things, I think, to think about.

To achieve such a fluctuating perspective, Mr. Reynolds skillfully combines the piano and vocal parts with computer-processed sounds, creating manifold possibilities for interaction between multiple musical strands. While the electronic strand develops gradually and helps shape the cycle as a whole, the baritone demonstrates a rich variety of vocal techniques from the very beginning. Interrupting the opening passage of "Debit Night" in mid-sentence, the first song, "I had thought," manifests many of the ways in which Mr. Reynolds uses the voice throughout the cycle. This poem is drawn from Mr. Ashbery's collection As We Know, and in it successive pairs of lines appear on different pages. Moreover, successive lines alternate in capital and lowercase letters. Those that are capitalized catch one's eye and seem to paint picturesque images; those in smaller print project these same images but in another light, resembling whispered asides that occasionally add ironic details. Mr. Reynolds's setting deals with this multifaceted text not merely by using two contrasting musical styles—as one might expect given the dual nature of the text—but rather by using a diverse...