Voices Up! will be back on Oct. 30 at 7:30 p.m. in Lincoln Center’s 12th-Floor lounge with its fall installment, Cantabile Quartet—Music for Strings and Piano. The concert is free for Fordham students and faculty.

The program will feature the music of two vintage modernists, Rebecca Clarke (1886-1979) and Bohuslav Martinu (1890-1959), as well as contemporary pieces by Fordham’s very own Lawrence Kramer, Ph.D., distinguished professor of English, and Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Paul Moravec, D.M.A., university professor of music at Adelphi University. Also on the program are original pieces by composers Alexander Liebermann and Giovanni Sollima. Listeners will be treated to a rare variation of musical styles featuring violin, viola, cello, and piano.

“There’s a very audience-friendly dimension to these pieces, all have melody that comes from an almost infinite possibility of combining these four instruments to produce sound worlds,” said Kramer. “We’re exploring these different combinations, like violin and viola, to great effect. There’s something you can do with those two instruments that you can’t do with any others and it’s very rare.”

Kramer said that there is not a single atonal piece in the program. Less Schoenberg, more Debussy, he said.

“There will be a diversity of sound, style, and sensibilities.”

Voices Up! will return in the spring, teaming up again with Poets Out Loud.

Besides Kramer’s music, the group will play recent compositions for string quartet by Academy-Award nominee Carter Burwell and Shelley Washington.

The group will perform the premiere of Kramer’s Wingspan and Brahms’s evergreen String Sextet No. 1. The concert will be held at 7:30 p.m. in the Corrigan Conference Center of Fordham’s Lowenstein Center, and is free.

Kramer is this year’s winner of the ASCAP Virgil Thomson Award for Outstanding Music Criticism, for his book The Thought of Music, published by University of California Press.

Quartet Metadata consists of: violinist Lynn Bechtold, who has appeared in recital throughout North America and Europe; violinist Hajnal Pivnick, co-founder of Tenth Intervention, a collective of musicians that presents new music in New York City; violist Carrie Frey, a founding member of string trio Chartreuse; and cellist Jisoo Ok, who has performed in venues and festivals including Lincoln Center, Carnegie Hall, and the Kennedy Center.

“Instead of thinking about which medium should dominate or take priority, the question became what their relationship is and how they interact with each other to create expressive effects, cultural meanings, and new musical forms,” said Lawrence Kramer, Ph.D., an accomplished composer and Distinguished Professor of English and Music.

“I think the relationship between words and music operates with a great deal of resonance and power, and with much more reach than it customarily gets credit for.”

In his new book, Song Acts: Writings on Words and Music (Brill, 2017), a collection of previously published essays spanning over two decades, Kramer examines art song, opera, and the intricate ways that words and classical music interconnect. Song Acts, Kramer’s 13th book about music, touches on music and poetry, sexuality, war, mourning, romanticism, and cultural change, among other topics.

For Kramer, music is a meaningful cultural activity—not just a pleasant pastime.

“The thing that I’ve been interested in doing over the years is asking how one can look at particular musical works and styles, even particular moments in musical performance, as barometers of complex cultural situations,” said Kramer, who previously published the trilogy, The Thought of Music (University of California Press, 2016), Expression and Truth: On the Music of Knowledge (University of California Press, 2012) and Interpreting Music (University of California Press, 2010). 

In one essay in Song Acts, “Little Pearl Teardrops,” originally published in 2002, Kramer explores the significance of tears in the music of romantic composers Franz Schubert and Robert Schumann. He cites 18^th-century literature, where crying was a sign of cultivation and “superior sensitivity.” In the piece, Kramer argues that the “tearful sensibility” woven in the romantic songs of Schubert and Schumann moves this tradition from a sense of cultural stratification into “a more strenuous emphasis on the intimacy of the relationships.”

“People who know how to cry, and are able to cry the right way and under the right circumstances, also reveal their class standing as well as their fundamental human connection,” said Kramer. “Music picks this up. It picks it up within the realm of the art song, which, among other things, is meant to demonstrate the same kind of sensitivity to feeling, power, empathy, and sympathy.”

A paper, “Syringa,” published in the early ‘80s, examines the American poet John Ashbery’s collaboration with the late Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Elliot Carter in 1978.

For Song Acts, Kramer said he revised and rewrote some of the previously published writings from the ground up to provide enriched perspectives.

“This allowed me to take advantage of both my own hopefully presumed maturation as a scholar, and, of course, other intellectual developments over the intervening years,” he said. “It gave me an opportunity to be my own critic.”

Being a composer as well as a musicologist provided Kramer with a greater degree of understanding of the complexity of art songs, he said.

“If you don’t have any experience composing vocal music, you might be able to say some really interesting and insightful things about it,” said Kramer. “But you might also miss some things which are more likely to occur to someone who is aware of what is demanded of you when you write this measure to these words.”

Song Acts aims to help listeners hear music more perceptively so they can respond more rewardingly to what they hear, he said.

“In relation to art songs in particular, the title of the book is also the takeaway,” he said. “Song, which most people love, is a way of acting. It has repercussions. It creates ripple effects. It evokes values. It is highly meaningful beyond the pleasures that it gives.”

Kramer, a prizewinning composer and Distinguished Professor of English and Music, argues in his new book The Thought of Music (University of California Press, 2016) that music is not just an expressive outlet, but a legitimate mode of thinking about the world.

The book is the final installment in a series of three, which includes Interpreting Music (2010) and Expression and Truth: On the Music of Knowledge (2012).

“The volumes together seek to answer three fundamental questions,” Kramer said. “First, what does understanding music consist of? Second, what does understanding music tell us about the character of humanistic understanding in general? And finally, what kind of knowledge does such understanding produce?”

The Thought of Music examines how we think about music and how we think by means of music, questions that Kramer said harken back to Beethoven’s definition of music as “thinking in tones.” Beyond being a means of expression, music can function as a way of thinking about critical human issues such as memory, language, pleasure, rationality, and sexuality, which are just some of the topics addressed in the book.

Elucidating the role that music plays in human thought is particularly important for the field of musicology, the academic study of music. Through the trilogy, Kramer’s goal is to bring music—particularly classical music—into broader conversations within the humanities about ideas such as meaning, identity, society, and culture.

“In the book, the notorious fact that it is difficult to specify what music means becomes a positive force rather than a disability,” Kramer said. “Music [is an example]of the difficulties posed by humanistic knowledge—a form of knowledge that, beyond raw data collection, always involves cognitive uncertainty.”

He was chatting with colleagues about the University’s Poets Out Loud program a few years ago when the conversation turned to music. “This sort of light bulb went on in my head,” said Kramer, Distinguished Professor in the Department of English.

The result was a series of concerts that combine poetry readings with performances of the poems’ musical versions. The third annual event in the series, Voices Up: New Music for New Poetry, will be held at 7:30 p.m. in the 12th-Floor Lounge of the Lowenstein Building. The concert was organized in conjunction with Poets Out Loud. Admission is free.

The event will feature original works by several prize-winning artists. A cellist, violinist and vocalist will perform new works by composers Paul Moravec—winner of the Pulitzer Prize—and David Dzubay, who wrote music for poems by Julie Choffel. Choffel, a member of the faculty at the University of Connecticut, will read from her book The Hello Delay, published by Fordham University Press. The book was the winner of the Poets Out Loud book competition for 2012.

The accompanying music will be performed by violinist Madalyn Parnas, cellist Cicely Parnas, and soprano Sharon Harms, all of whom are students at Indiana University, where David Dzubay teaches. Because their lineup includes the premiere of a piece by Kramer, who is a prize-winning composer, he will read the poetry he wrote as the song’s lyrics. In addition, a work by Hungarian composer Gyorgy Kurtag, comprising fragments from the work of Franz Kafka, will be performed.

This year’s event departs from the standard voice-and-piano format of classical song. The combination of violin, cello and voice “creates all kinds of interesting possibilities, which we’re eager to explore,” Kramer said.

He noted that the event belongs to a centuries-long tradition of marrying poetry with music. He cited the example of prolific composer Franz Schubert, an avid reader of poetry and friend of many poets, who wrote his songs using their poems as lyrics as soon as they were published.

“That’s the way it works in the world of classical song,” he said. “The idea is that you create a relationship between musical expression and poetic expression.”

Because it can be distracting for audience members to follow the poet’s words on paper, he said, the format includes no copies of the poems. Audience members will only listen: First they will hear the poem read, and then they will hear it sung.

“What happens is the expressive additions that come about by putting it to music become more available to people, because they’ve heard the poet reading the poem in the poet’s own voice,” he said. “That really has an impact, we discovered.”

— Chris Gosier

The lighting was subdued, the audience laid back, and the mood pitched from contemplative to sentimental to celebratory, as poetry lovers filled the Rubenstein Atrium at Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts on Oct. 27 to celebrate 20 years of Fordham University’s Poets Out Loud.

Poets J.D. McClatchy and Julie Sheehan read their works for more than 300 attendees. A trio of musicians, led by Lawrence Kramer, Ph.D., Distinguished Professor of English, performed his original composition Song Cycle both in spoken format and to music.

“At 20 years, this is just the beginning,” said POL Founder Frank Boyle, Ph.D., associate professor of English. “[We have] wild expectations for the future.”

(Photos by Michael Dames)

–Janet Sassi

If lectures on the Sonata and the Domestic Novel, or Tennyson’s Ambivalence & Strauss’ Revision, pique your curiosity, it’s worth checking out “Counterpoints: 19th Century Literature & Music,” being held this Oct. 21 and 22 at Fordham University’s Lincoln Center campus.

The event is sponsored by the university and the Department of English’s publication, 19th Century Music.

The two days of lectures by junior faculty and graduate students from North American universities will also give thought to the works of Oscar Wilde, Proust, Schubert, Brahms, Debussy, Baudelaire, and more.

Lawrence Kramer, Ph.D., Distinguished Professor of English and Music, is the conference director.

On the evening of Oct. 22nd the event will have a fitting close, with a free piano recital honoring the 200th anniversary of the birth of Hungarian composer and piano virtuoso Franz Liszt.

You can find more information here.

–Janet Sassi