I wrote Prelude and Fugue for myself. At the time, I was experiencing some writer’s block, and so I figured that the rigor of fugue structure, on the one hand, and the familiarity of writing for the instrument I play would help to make the writing process easier. What resulted however, was a piece that was anything but easy, and it proved to be quite a challenge for me as a violinist. The Prelude features two contrasting characters, the first initially abrupt and compact, and the second more lyrical and suspended. However, the first character grows more emphatic as the movement unfolds, and eventually forms the link between the otherwise stylistically and motivically unrelated Fugue movement. This movement pays homage to the great Sonatas and Partitas for Unaccompanied Violin by J.S. Bach.

Alice Culin-Ellison, violin
live performance, WUOL Lunchtime Classics

Alice Culin-Ellison/Louisville

Prelude and Fugue: II. Fugue (2005)

Prelude and Fugue: I. Prelude (2005)

Letters Made with Gold is about being in love, and knowing that you, and your beloved, will die. The cycle traces a progression from youthful passion and optimism, through denial and anger, to acceptance. The three texts come from the repertoires of Appalachian sacred and secular song that I have been exploring over the past five years. 

“My luve is like a red, red rose,” by Robert Burns (1797), is the first, and best-known text. In setting it, I was struck by the speaker’s frequently apocalyptic imagery, and the way in which thoughts of death sneak in and temper his otherwise ebullient mood. I first came across “And am I born to die?,” by Charles Wesley (1763), in the Southern Harmony, a long-boy hymnal popular within the Sacred Harp singing tradition. In this hymn, the speaker confronts her mortality and contemplates the nature of an afterlife. “My dearest dear,” the third and final song, is a variant of “The True Lover’s Farewell” that folksong collector Cecil Sharp transcribed in Virginia in 1918. Sharp subsequently published it in his anthology English Folk Songs from the Southern Appalachians (1918). In setting this text, I have chosen not to make any “corrections” to the grammar, etc.: I like it just the way it is! 

While all three texts have associated tunes, I have deliberately not used them, but instead have composed my own tunes in a style that, I think, still betrays the influence of the repertoires from which they come. In particular, Old Regular Baptist lined-out hymnody was a source of inspiration. When I first heard Old Regular hymnody, I was overwhelmed by its honesty, immediacy, and rhythmic freedom, and it is these same qualities that I have tried to impart to Letters Made with Gold.

Letters Made With Gold- III. My Dearest Dear (2011)

Letters Made With Gold- II. And Am I Born To Die (2011)

Letters Made With Gold- I. My Luve Is Like A Red, Red Rose (2011)

Lucy Dhegrae, voice; Contemporaneous, David Bloom, conductor

The Cold Pane: II. The Cold Pane (2013)

The Cold Pane: I. It Is Almost Spring Again (2013)

Ryan Muncy, baritone saxophone

Many of my recent works have been for voice, and in them I have re-set existing Appalachian folksongs and hymn texts with newly composed music that loosely imitates the style of the original traditions from which the texts came. The Carolina Lady, however, is the first piece I’ve written in which I composed directly with the musical source material itself—material that I previously imitated only indirectly. Paradoxically, I believe this direct engagement can lead to a music that is less derivative, more flexible, and personal. What I am after is a deeper engagement with the underlying structures of these folksong traditions, as opposed to their surface-level melodic idioms and pitch language, as well as a more acute awareness of fleeting sonic details that often elude transcription. I am searching for a music that possesses all the incredible richness, complexity, and rawness of these folk traditions without being limited to their specific sound worlds: a kind of lost, distant cousin. This project is an attempt to find that cousin.

The Carolina Lady (2015)

In Old Virginny is the second in what I hope will be an ongoing series of settings from Cecil Sharp’s English Folk Songs from the Southern Appalachians (the first was Pastor Hicks’ Farewell, also for soprano and double bass). Sharp’s anthology contains transcriptions he made of traditional ballad singing while traveling through the Appalachians in the early twentieth century. He often transcribed multiple versions of the same song, and the differences are striking. Some singers omit (forget) entire stanzas, or change certain words, or sing the words to a different tune altogether. In choosing to set Sharp’s transcriptions, I have chosen to accept the printed text, with all of its “imperfections,” as a given, and have not sought to “improve” it.

The first two stanzas of In Old Virginny present the weary remembrances of a man looking back on his travels and a long lost love. The fourth and fifth stanzas present the viewpoint of his female lover: her violent devotion to him, and her desperation and anger in the face of a terrible action he committed. The viewpoint of the third and sixth stanzas, however, is more ambiguous. I chose to imagine these two stanzas as shared memories, and pictured the two lovers, now much older, and separated by enormous geographical and emotional distances, both singing the same old song, both yearning, separately, for the love they lost.

Duo Borealis

In Old Virginny (2007)

Poor & Wretched, completed in 2008, is the first piece in which I have tried to pay homage to one of my great musical loves: the lined-out hymnody of the Old Regular Baptists of central Appalachia. The Old Regulars are a Baptist sub-denomination who trace their beliefs back to seventeenth-century Calvinism. Their singing tradition, lining-out, also stretches back to the seventeenth century. In the United States today, they constitute the sole preservers of this tradition.

Old Regular hymnals contain words only. The tunes are transmitted orally. A leader begins a hymn by singing the first line to brief melody. Immediately thereafter, the congregation sings the first line again, but to a very elaborated and extended melody. Furthermore, each member of the congregation sings the melody a little differently, resulting in a highly heterophonic texture. Some hold particular notes just a little bit longer than others, some add flourishes and decorations, some project vowels against the hard palate in the characteristic mountain style. All sing at the very top of their lungs.

This music is not intended for recordings or for concerts, but rather for praising the Lord. The Old Regulars believe that their song brings the Holy Spirit into their worship place. During the composition of Poor & Wretched, I traveled to Berea College, in Berea, Kentucky, and spent an entire day listening to the William H. Tallmadge collection of sound recordings of lined-out hymnody. Without directly quoting any material, I sought, in this piece, to pay tribute to the complexity, the rawness, and the honesty of the Old Regulars’ singing. The title is taken a hymn printed in William Walker's The Southern Harmony (first edition, 1835), a shape-note hymnal that, although not used by the Old Regulars, contains many of their hymns.

Michael Lewanski/dal niente

Poor & Wretched (2008)

I wrote Pastor Hicks' Farewell for my friends, Evan Premo and Mary Bonhag. As I was finding my way into the piece, I decided to get to know the music of Kentucky, my home state. This decision proved to be a good one, because I fell in love with the incredible tradition of ballad singing in the Southern Appalachian Mountains. Every aspect of this music fascinated me: the words, the tunes, the honesty of the music and its musicians, and the characteristic style of vocal inflection. One song in particular, “Hicks Farewell,” struck me as being particularly beautiful. The words of the song are the last words of a dying preacher, a man weary from many miles of travel, a man who dearly loved his wife, and who missed her every mile along the way. I chose to combine several variants of this song together to form the text of my song, and then set this version with the general vocal style of the Southern Appalachian tradition in mind, but without using any of the actual music.

Duo Borealis/Congregational Church

Pastor Hicks' Farewell (2006)

Composers Conference Ensemble, James Baker, conductor

Wilderness of Woe grows out of free transcriptions of transformed audio taken from live recordings of Bill Monroe and the Blue Grass Boys. By stretching brief sonic moments—the sound of slack bow hair scraping against a violin string, the grain of a voice as it begins to sing—up to 200 times their original length, I transform these moments into vast landscapes of sound, revealing their complex micro-structures. These audio landscapes then become the starting point for my composition.

We live in a culture of information overload and distraction; my working method affords an extended focus and reflection on single sounds. Anya Ventura writes: "To be slow is to be disobedient to the world as it is." I invite the listener to go slowly and get lost in this wilderness of sound.

Wilderness of Woe: II. Wayfaring Stranger (2017)

Resignation (2017)
A re-working of words and music from the traditional hymn, "My Shepherd Will Provide My Need"

Lucy Dhegrae, voice; Nathaniel LaNasa, piano

image credit: Office of the United States House of Representatives, public domain

Resignation (2017)

Emi Ferguson, flute; Renate Rohlfing, piano (live performance)

going away (2020)
three transcriptions of songs from harry smith’s anthology of american folk music (1952)

i. …to a world unknown (after charley patton’s “down the dirt road blues”)
ii. …on a mountain so high (after clarence ashley’s “the coo-coo bird”)
iii. …pour te voir [to see you] (after joe falcon and cleoma breaux’s “acadian one-step”)

going away is a set of three “transcriptions” of songs from Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music, first released by Folkways Records in 1952, comprised of recordings made between 1927-32. The Anthology was hugely influential to the generation of musicians who came of age during the 1950s folk revival, and its 1997 reissue by Smithsonian Folkways only cemented its importance. In going away, what I choose to “transcribe” is not always notes and rhythms, but more often so-called “secondary” characteristics of the recordings—the hiss of an old record, the thud of a blues-man’s tapping foot, the blurred resonance of a banjo in “sawmill” tuning, the in-and-out contraction and expansion of accordion playing. The result is a set of pieces that hopefully captures the spirit of these incredible recordings, without being beholden to their letter. In the words of Greil Marcus, this is the “old, weird America."

going away: iii. ...pour te voir [to see you] (2020)

Shawn Jaeger writes music that often engages Appalachian folksong, field recording, and sonic ephemera to explore creative placemaking and personal and cultural memory.

Shawn Jaeger

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