Robert Frost was an American poet much admired for his depictions of rural life in New England, his command of American colloquial speech, and his realistic verse portraying ordinary people in everyday situations.
Randall Thompson Sets to Song Seven of Frost’s Poems in Frostiana
Since its premiere on October 18, 1959, Randall Thompson’s Frostiana: Seven Country Songs has secured a beloved place in the American choral canon and has been performed hundreds of times by professional and amateur choirs around the United States. Commissioned by the Amherst, MA town council to commemorate the bicentennial of the town’s founding, this imminently accessible and traditionally melodic choral composition has generated interest far beyond its regional appeal. Like Robert Frost’s poetry, which comprises its libretto, Frostiana conveys universal emotions and insights that transcend time and bind generations in a continuity of shared human experiences.
In selecting a librettist who might best capture the town’s complex revolutionary history and character, Thompson might have chosen to put to music the words of the town’s most famous native poet, Emily Dickinson, whose notorious eccentricities and ascending stature as one of the nation’s most important poets certainly would have made her a viable focal point for this commission. Dickinson’s intimacy with the region’s flora and fauna, her capacious imagination (“the brain is wider than the sky”), and her practice of composing her poems in common measure, the most familiar poetic rhythm of the 19th-Century Christian hymnal, made her a natural contender for a librettist.
Like Robert Frost’s poetry, which comprises its libretto, Frostiana conveys universal emotions and insights that transcend time and bind generations in a continuity of shared human experiences.
Why then, did Thompson choose Frost, an itinerant and sometimes disgruntled faculty member of Amherst College for more than forty years, as his preferred librettist? Though the historical evidence for Thompson’s choice is scant, several possible reasons present themselves.
The first is that Frost’s poems, as evidenced by his enduring popularity, are far more accessible to a wider literary audience than are Dickinson’s. Unlike Dickinson’ poetry, which is suffused with incomplete syntactical structures, frequent dashes that interrupt her rhythms, and incredibly dense metaphors that demand intense scrutiny to decipher, Frost’s poems are simple and accessible on the surface, thus allowing readers to enter and enjoy them on a variety of different levels. Because Frost’s surface simplicity often masks his philosophical complexity, his poems appeal to both amateurs and seasoned scholars alike. His familiar pastoral subjects, his keen understanding of human psychology—particularly his examination of the differences between men and women—his pathos, and his ability to capture the cadences and idiosyncratic lexicon of New England speech must have appealed to Thompson’s own idiomatic sensibilities (he had spent most of his adult life in Massachusetts). In Frost Thompson found an artist who shared his commitment to portraying Massachusetts’ distinctive linguistic features.
Thompson also recognized in Frost’s poems an expansive historical scope.
A national celebrity to whom the United States Senate sent an official birthday greeting in 1950, Frost was often perceived in the popular imagination as American as apple pie or the Grand Canyon. Part of the reason for this perception was that Frost frequently lauded the American experiment in Democracy, publicly stating on the lecture dais that the United States had invented the greatest government in human history. Familiar poems such as “Mending Wall,” which examines the idea that boundaries, though necessary, must also be permeable enough to establish intercultural exchange and cooperation among competing nations, and “The Gift Outright,” which Frost first read at the College of William and Mary two days before the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, secured Frost’s reputation as a committed patriot with unquestioned devotion to his country. In commemorating a region of the nation that sent more soldiers into battle during the American Revolution than any other colony, Thompson must have viewed Frost as an ideal librettist, not only because he perfectly represented the history of the American struggle to secure liberty, but also because he was a poet whose work might instill confidence in the nation during the height of Cold War tensions.
While these two reasons may have factored into Thompson’s choice of Frost, perhaps the most important reason is that the composer and the poet shared a common aesthetic taste. They both favored musical expression that was not only accessible but beautiful and appealing to the ear. As early as 1914, Frost developed an aesthetic theory that he called the “Sound of Sense.” Unlike many of his modernist contemporaries whose experiments with imagism, vorticism, and free verse ruptured traditional poetic forms, Frost preferred an aesthetic that featured “old ways to be new.” Rejecting modernist innovations, Frost instead composed in traditional meters but augmented the metrical line with the tonal variations inherent in human speech. In stressing the idea that he wanted to compose in a familiar idiom that “even Wordsworth kept above,” Frost created a new sound never before heard in American poetry. By embedding the rhetorical tones of human speech in a traditional iambic line, Frost created a fugue-like structure in his verse that brought together variant musical lines. When juxtaposed against one another in a single line of verse, tonal variation and recurring cadence created a singular harmony. The effect of this method was that Frost was better able to release the dramatic tones of human emotion as his poems expressed moments of actual lived experience.
Both Words and Music are Accessible
Like Robert Frost’s, Thompson’s aesthetic rejected modernist innovation and surface complexity in favor of musical phrasing that remained accessible. Knowing that Frostiana would first be performed by amateur singers with limited rehearsal time, Thompson self-consciously composed his chorale so it would not strain the capabilities of the choir singing it. In describing the work, Thompson revealed his intentions. “There are no fussy parts or high notes,” he stated. “There is a certain amount of unison singing, and the rest is uncomplicated.”
Beyond his sensitivity to his performers, Thompson also shared with Frost a commitment to combining polyphonic phrases into a singular harmony. An expert in “modal” or “vocal” counterpoint, Thompson’s work frequently coordinates a progression of multiple melodic lines that combine with one another so that each voice contributes equally to the harmony. Rather than superimposing harmonies upon a singular melodic line, Thompson’s phrasing, like Frost’s “Sound of Sense,” creates disparate melodies that not only come together in perfect unison but also rise and fall in the ebb and flow of tonal variation and projection. The result of Thompson’s technique is a musical phrasing conducive to Frost’s lyrics. Neither Thompson’s music, most often composed in 4/4 time with occasional flights into 6/8, nor Frost’s lyrics upstage one another in the dramatic performance. At times, Thompson even extends whole notes to emphasize particular words. Both Frost’s lyrics and Thompson’s notes are fully accessible to the voice and ear, which was one of Thompson’s goals when he persuaded Frost to grant him permission to put the music of his poetry to the music of Thompson’s choral melodies.
The Bane of Popularity of the Moment
Unfortunately, both Thompson and Frost’s reputations suffered because of their preferred aesthetic techniques. To be popular, so the thinking went, was to be shallow. According to Malcolm Cowley, for example, Frost’s poetry was nothing more than a nostalgic glance to a bygone era. In an August 18, 1944 letter to Mary Mellon, the founder of the prestigious Bollingen Prize in poetry, Cowley wrote: “I don’t like Frost, or to be more exact, I don’t like the sort of veneration that surrounds this honest but rather minor poet. . . . He’s a genuine Hitchcock chair, a saltbox cottage, a grandfather’s clock, a well sweep carefully preserved after the electric pump system has been installed; he’s everything nice in the antique shop, but he isn’t the voice of America.” Thompson’s reputation suffered a similar fate. The New Yorker, for example, derided Thompson’s Alleluia, his most famous work and one of the most popular choral compositions in American history, as “deathless.”
Fortunately, both men’s critical reputations have lately enjoyed a Renaissance. More recent appraisals of the poet and composer have commended the quality of their work, with critics frequently citing their complexity, subtlety, and homage to the traditions they inherited. They have often been praised for refusing to surrender their artistic authenticity to the fashions of the moment. By remaining true to their respective traditions, Frost and Thompson displayed a conviction that their aesthetics complemented one another. Both recognized that the medium of poetry and the medium for song was not ink and paper or the staff and score but the human voice. Though we sometimes forget that in its earliest forms, poetry was an oral performance often accompanied by musical instruments, there has always been a natural connection between poetry and music. This artistic collaboration displays that common ancestry beautifully and reveals that the singular aspirant song is crucial to a greater understanding of our humanity.
—Robert Bernard Hass
Robert Bernard Hass, poet, critic and scholar introduced the presentation of Randall Thompson’s musical composition, Frostiana when it was performed on October 19 by the San Diego Master Chorale in cooperation with the Robert Frost Society. He is currently professor of English at PennWest, Edinboro and serves as Executive Director of the Robert Frost Society. His publications include Going by Contraries: Robert Frost’s Conflict with Science,and the poetry collection Counting Thunder. He has won an Academy of American Poets Prize, an Associated Writing Programs Intro Journals Award, and a fellowship to the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. He teaches creative writing, American literature, British literature, classical literature, and Shakespeare at Pennsylvania Western University, Edinboro. He is also an editor of Harvard’s five-volume edition of Frost’s correspondence, The Letters of Robert Frost.
