What are the implications of setting Sylvia Plath? What does it mean for a female composer to set Plath for two unaccompanied treble voices? The score for Kaija Saariaho’s From the Grammar of Dreams (1988) calls for a soprano and mezzo-soprano; the singers don’t necessarily have to be women, but these voice types are statistically likely to belong to performers assigned female at birth. Moreover, they will realistically be heard as female by an audience. All told, this can be read as a particularly “female” work, in a musical realm in which an all-male or predominantly male composer-poet-performer combinations are traditionally far more common. And so, what does it mean to set a writer whose legacy is often elided and diminished to the “sad lady poetry” – or “sad ladies’ poetry” – of a woman who famously died by suicide, whose depression and death loom so heavily over her work both in its actual content and in the public imagination? Saariaho sets two different texts: “Paralytic,” a poem not included in the original manuscript of Ariel but added by Plath’s husband Ted Hughes when the collection was published after her death in 1965, and three short excerpts from her novel The Bell Jar (1963), also published posthumously. Both of the larger works from which these texts are taken and the extracts themselves are rife with death, mental illness and suicidal ideation, in ways that cannot be untangled from femininity.
To some extent, it’s possible to read Saariaho’s setting as falling into a certain trap of feminine hysteria, highlighting the “woman on the verge” specter in the texts themselves and in the closely imbricated meta-textual narrative of Plath’s life. In the first two pieces, the soprano and mezzo sing two different texts simultaneously, each from one of the works. Individual syllables are blown up and scrutinized to the point of illegibility. A vocalise of [a], [e] and [i] occurs for the entire first page of the mezzo-soprano’s music in the first piece, ultimately turning into either the first sounds of “a bad dream” or “I remembered” – or perhaps both. The soprano text, meanwhile, is also taken apart, albeit on a shorter scale, and mainly through its consonants: “it happens” over the course of mm. 2-4, for instance, broken down to extended [t→ð] and [s], and stammering [h].
Movement 1: “it happens” and vocalic breakdown
The ranges throughout the work are extensive and incorporate a number of vocal techniques beyond a lot of typical classical singing: unpitched speech and quasi Sprechstimme, breath sounds, glissandi, specific phoneme notation, as well as a great deal of interplay between straight tone, vibrato, tremolo, trills and notated turns, grace notes or appoggiaturas. The resulting composition is thorny, dramatic, complicated. But it’s also, ultimately, more clear-headed than hysterical. This effect largely relies on the two performers allowing their parts to slot into one another meticulously but also organically, which becomes more apparent as the movements go on. The third piece serves as a keystone of the work. For the first time, the two singers perform the same text in a slow, melismatic polyphony whose setting is far simpler and more overtly beautiful (albeit still full of dissonances) than the aurally busy first two movements. With this in mind, the convoluted layerings of different texts and their component breakdowns seem to mirror the mental process of creation and composition within one person. The repetitions, fragmentations, sound dissections and concurrent texts aren’t hysterical or obsessive but rather generative. Different streams occur at once ultimately to coalesce to a common, streamlined entity.
Classical musical notation – and its extensions – does some disservice to the work and makes its soundscape more illegible. The fourth and fifth pieces return to a heightened state that’s again, at first glance of the score, potentially cacophonous and chaotic. The fourth song plays on hocketting rhythms in quick succession between the two singers, at first as breath sounds and then around a limited set of repeating pitches. The effect from each individual voice is a potentially alarming series of gasps and fragments, but taken as an ensemble, it turns into the ebb and flow of breathing and the “old brag of my heart” referenced in the text that beats out an obstinate “I am, I am, I am.”
Movement 4: breath and “I am” heartbeat ebb and flow hocket
The fifth, and final, song, serves as a sort of coda. It too, looks like an obtuse and overwhelming mass of high and dissonant trills, tremolos and chromatic melismas on the page, but it’s ultimately a series of interlacing overtones through an extensive vocalise for both singers on the vocalic components of the diphthong [a:i]. It’s only at the end of the piece that [a] turns into the “I.” The lines converge, in an echo of the third movement’s incremental and responding polyphony, to a shared and intelligible sentence: “I smile.”
Movement 5: call and response between the vocal lines
The two achingly simple statements that close out the last two movements provide a key to the work as a whole, and a reading of Sylvia Plath’s work. It’s not a piece about disintegration but about creation, in all its rough edges and jagged starts. It’s not about dying but about living.