“Early Songs”: A Composer’s Journal Entry December 16, 2004

Journal entries by composer and pianist Laurie Conrad

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figaro
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“Early Songs”: A Composer’s Journal Entry December 16, 2004

Post by figaro »

“Early Songs”: Composer’s Journal Entry December 16, 2004

The cds have arrived!!! Two big boxes of them, by the front door tonight. I suppose they were standing out there all day, M. found them when she came home. Diana did a smashing job on the covers & inserts ...

So I’m sitting here in the living room, holding a cd with an old picture of Louise & I by the Atlantic Ocean on a summer’s day. Louise is flying a kite, & we are standing on rocks in our bare feet ... We were on tour, giving concerts & stopped at the beach, to visit my folks in Manasquan, N.J.. It was my birthday, Carolyn was about 8 years old. My brother in law Glenn took the photo ... On the way, we got lost - we always got lost.

The early songs ... My first song was Morning for voice & clarinet - & I think it is still my favorite song. It was Louise’s favorite song as well ...

Louise ... I was looking all over town for a singer, and one day Louise and I met in her sister Jude’s kitchen. I had come back early, from a few months stay in N.Y.C.; my little house was subletted out while I was in the City, & the tenant still had some weeks left. Jude asked if I wanted to stay at her house & I accepted. I slept on her living room couch & my cat Nell had three kittens in an upstairs closet. It was a duplex, & Louise & little Carolyn lived in the other half of the house. One day I was in the kitchen & Louise came in. We were talking, & I mentioned that I couldn’t find a singer for an upcoming concert. She finally said: “I’m a singer.” That was the start of a long and wonderful musical and personal association. Louise sang my 12 tone songs everywhere, in concerts, in recording studios, on the back of a truck, on the steps of the Metropolitan Museum, at the Cloisters, street corners in the Village in NYC ... For the Studio N recordings, I played both the piano and clarinet parts, we dubbed the clarinet parts in on a separate track later. The first day Louise and I recorded alone. It was cold & snowing and on the way home my car slid into a ditch. We walked back to the studio and stayed there overnight, in a small upstairs room & had breakfast with Dave & Jill the next morning. A day later the other musicians arrived. We had a short rehearsal with the other musicians and then taped the songs. In those days none of us had money; Dave charged me almost nothing to record us, & none of the musicians got paid, not even Louise.

Louise was singing jazz with her father’s band when I met her, & some rock with a local group. Her voice - was astounding. Twelve tone is very difficult to sing - I found no one else, either in Ithaca or in N.Y.C. that could find the pitches. Louise never learned to read music, but she unerringly found the pitches. Whenever I wrote a new song, we would make a practice tape for her. She listened to the tape as she painted her beautiful paintings or washed the dishes or made dinner - & sang along. Once she knew a song, she never forgot it. Her daughter Carolyn also learned the songs, & sometimes when we were driving somewhere in my little yellow VW, Carolyn would hum a few lines of one of my twelve tone tunes ... She was only 8 years old ... It is the same Carolyn who now has Elisabeth & little Ian.

Louise’s voice had a unique and beautiful richness and clarity. Her working range was extraordinary, three full octaves at the time of the Studio N recordings. (Second space bass clef “c” to high “c” above the treble clef staff.) Sometimes I would write very low or high pitches in a song to see just how far her range could stretch - one time I wrote a low “d” in bass clef, & when she read through the song we both laughed - but she sang it.

All the songs on this cd, except the tonal tune Do You Remember, were taped at David Arnay’s Studio N in Ithaca, NY over two days in January, 1983.

The tonal tune So Many Lovers was my first tonal tune, and was written for a play directed by Carolyn Fellman at the First Street Playhouse. The other tonal songs were written for various concerts and events. Most people enjoy the tonal tunes the most. Louise sang anything I wrote for her, but the twelve tone songs were our favorites. Carolyn once said she thought her mom incarnated so that she could sing my songs ... I will never perform the songs I wrote for her with anyone else - they are hers. I still write songs for her & I call them “Unsung Songs”. Perhaps one day another soprano will sing them, & I will rehearse with them & go to the concert & listen. But they will have to approach me, I will not search for anyone to sing them.

The recording of Do You Remember was in 1993, not long after my car accident and a year before Louise died. I was still using a cane. A key stuck on the piano at Calf Audio, so some notes are missing in the piano part. Louise had her second cancer operation the same week as my car accident, and she had not really sung during the ten or so years she was in California with her husband. Therefore, her voice was not technically what it had been earlier. For me, the new quality of her voice and its minor flaws add to the beauty of the song; the added emotional depth and quality of physical fragility now present in her voice seemed to better match the emotion and meaning of the words.

I only saw Louise once more after this recording. She died of cancer the next year.


CD INSERT:


Early SONGS by Laurie Conrad

with Soprano Louise McConnell (1946 - 1994)
and Baritone Graham Stewart

Recorded at David Arnay’s Studio N in Ithaca, NY on January 27 and January 30, 1983


Program Notes by the Composer:
Being clairvoyant and clairaudient, I see and hear things that most people are not consciously aware of. The texts to many of my songs reflect my inner experiences. Twelve tone, with its lack of a tonal center, seems to best portray other realms. I think of the tonal system, with all its beauty, being more a natural expression of our physical world - it is based on the lower partials of the overtone series. The chromatic notes that appear in the twelve tone system appear very late in the overtone series, in fact they are mainly inaudible to humans; therefore, in my mind, twelve tone has always represented that which is unseen and unheard, i.e. realms available only to clairvoyants and clairaudients.

In these early songs, I follow the rules of twelve tone very strictly, especially in the two line songs. In my writing now, I break many rules if not most of them - and sometimes abandon the twelve tone system altogether. So, for me, this disc outlines an important stage of my musical development, and one that I most likely will never return to. This might be difficult for a non-musician to understand, but I lived those sounds completely and thoroughly - and now my inner being is no longer there. To state in another way: to write in that mode now would not be a true reflection of my inner being.

The master tapes to all the songs except “Do You Remember” were misplaced or lost, so this disc was patched together from many different copies of the original master. My deep thanks to Al Grunwald who helped unearth tapes from his archives and for his restoring and remastering skills.
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