Simple Daylight

Lydia Brown, John Harbison, Devony Smith, interviewed by Robert Kirzinger

Duration: 1 hour and 24 minutes

About: Composer John Harbison, performers Devony Smith and Lydia Brown, and moderator Robert Kirzinger discuss John Harbison’s song cycle Simple Daylight with text by Michael Fried. The cycle is discussed in depth, covering various angles of its development - Harbison’s discovery of Fried’s poems, his creation of the cycle, qualities of the music itself, and finally, the experiences of the performers in their preparation and performance of the piece. The session ends with Devony Smith & Lydia Brown’s SongFest performance of selections from Simple Daylight in 2018.

Composer Note: It has been a source of satisfaction to me that the first performers and listeners for Simple Daylight have been especially struck by the poems, and by the strong musical responses elicited by the poems. I have been grateful for Michael Fried’s work in many ways, most obviously in my previous settings of his texts, in Three Harp Songs (1972) and in The Flower Fed Buffaloes (1976). My ordering of his poems makes a sequence closer in tone to a Bach Cantata text than to a nineteenth-century song cycle, and evokes a kind of sub-cutaneous narrative very favorable for musical purposes, but no doubt unintended by the poet. Simple Daylight was commissioned by Lincoln Center. The dedication to its first singer Dawn Upshaw represents my complete confidence in sending her into uncharted waters, as well as my intuition that she would enjoy the complete, motet-like partnership with the pianist that the cycle requires. -- John Harbison

Resources:

• Purchase Simple Daylight or other selections by John Harbison

• More About Michael Fried

About the Presenters