Variations on a Summer Day

25 min.

September 1, 2012
Mary Nessinger, mezzo-soprano
Sequitur
Alexander Platt , conductor

Commissioned for Maverick Concerts, Alexander Platt, Director, by the Fromm Music Foundation at Harvard University

From college in western Massachusetts I went to law school in New York, and then to the law firm of Patterson Belknap. The trade, of rolling hills and red maple leaves for office buildings and elevator banks, mirrored my trade of writing music round the clock for writing memoranda and discovery requests, also round the clock. The music I composed in those years came late at night, in the law school library or, later, behind the blinds at my office desk, in the interstices. My idols were professionals for whom creating art was an escape and a release: Charles Ives, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams. I was most attracted to Stevens, whose poetry captured the wild disconnect of irrational and lurid imagery emerging from buttoned-down passages of the language of the office. Variations on a Summer Day, though, is Stevens on vacation, in Bermuda shorts, in Damariscotta and the Berkshires. Alexander Platt, director of Maverick Concerts in Woodstock, New York, asked me for a companion piece to Maurice Ravel’s Trois Poèmes de Stéphane Mallarmé, for the same combination of mezzo-soprano and nine instruments, for a summer concert in 2012. For that concert I set eight stanzas from the Stevens poem, commissioned by the Fromm Music Foundation at Harvard University. Mary Nessinger sang with Sequitur at this and at subsequent performances in New York and Pittsburgh, for which I began to add settings of other stanzas from the poem. The final version of the Variations was premiered in July 2016 during Contemporary Music Week at the Tanglewood Music Festival, with Quinn Middleman singing and David Fulmer conducting the TMC Fellows.

“Stevens’s poems are intellectual and enigmatic and wouldn’t seem to me prime material for song settings. Meltzer’s style, though, suits the texts very well; he writes a kind of dissonant lyricism that seems a fine musical complement to Stevens. Meltzer’s scoring, using the same ensemble called on later in the program for a Ravel cycle, was very imaginative… the audience liked it and so did I, and I’d be interested in hearing it again.”

 

“[M]ezzo-soprano Quinn Middleman made a similarly persuasive case for Harold Meltzer’s ‘Variations on a Summer Day,’ a gleaming setting of texts from the Wallace Stevens poem of the same name.”