Whitman Songs

MTT and Thomas Hampson at the recording session.
Photo: Matthew Washburn/SFCM

“In my early thirties, I began reading Walt Whitman, starting with Leaves of Grass. The encounter, particularly with Song of Myself, was transforming. Whitman’s life work is revolutionary, and it helped me deal with the big question of ‘Who am I?’ One of the answers Whitman gave me was, ‘I am an American.’

As a young man, I was involved primarily in the music of the European-based avant-garde. For a long time, I measured the degree of respectability of a work by the amount and the intensity of the dissonance it contained. This conflicted with the more consonant music I intuitively wanted to compose. The ‘strongly American’ language of the Whitman Songs are a blend of several American styles, including folk song, rock and roll ballads, and lyrical Broadway. This breadth of reference poses a considerable challenge to the singer. The songs need ‘big singing’ by a fearless baritone with an easy top and who, in addition to being good at lieder and opera, needs to feel comfortable with popular music. It requires a big singing actor to create the sense of exhortation, tenderness, and danger that is in the words. Thomas Hampson was a part of this project from the beginning. I wrote the first version of ‘We Two Boys Together Clinging’ for his recording of Walt Whitman settings. Writing these songs for him has been an essential part of the joy and urgency that I hope they convey. I began composing them in 1993 and finished the set the following year. Thomas Hampson and I presented the premiere of the piano/vocal version at the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam in 1998. He was soloist in the first performances of the orchestral version, with the San Francisco Symphony, in 1999. I revised the work in 2023 and that year conducted the New World Symphony in this final version, again with Thomas Hampson.

I see the sequence of these songs as a journey from dissonance to consonance. ‘Who Goes There?’ (from Song of Myself) is the toughest of the three songs, the one with the most hard-edged harmonies and the most jagged vocal line. ‘At Ship’s Helm’ (from Sea Drift) comes across as a more lyric interlude in a slower tempo. ‘We Two Boys Together Clinging’ (from Calamus) is a march, even though it’s in three-four time. Its harmonies are firmly triadic. The opening lines, ‘We two boys together clinging,/One the other never leaving,’ suggests a sentimental genre, but in fact the poem is a crescendo of determination and strength, culminating in the military image of ‘fulfilling our foray.'”

—Michael Tilson Thomas

Text

1. Who Goes There?
Who goes there? Hankering, gross, mystical, nude?
How is it I extract strength from the beef I eat?

What is a man anyhow? What am I? What are you?

All I mark as my own, you shall offset it with your own,
else it were time lost listening to me.

I do not snivel that snivel the world over,
that months are vacuums and the ground but wallow and filth.

That life is a stuck and a sell, and nothing remains at the end but threadbare crepe and tears.

Whimpering and truckling fold with powders for invalids; conformity goes to the fourth-removed.
I cock my hat as I please inside or out.

Why should I pray? Why should I venerate and be ceremonious?

Having pried through the strata, analyzed to a hair, counseled with doctors and calculated close,
I find no sweeter fat than sticks to my own bones.

In all people I see myself, none more and not one a barleycorn less.
And the good or bad I say of myself, I say of them.

I know I am solid and sound.
To me, the converging objects of the universe perpetually flow.
All, all are written to me, and I must get what the writing means.

—from Song of Myself

2. At Ship’s Helm
Aboard at ship’s helm,
a young steersman is steering with care.

Through the fog on a sea beach dolefully ringing,
an ocean bell—a warning bell rocked by the waves.

Oh, you give good counsel indeed, you bell by the sea reefs [coast] ringing,
Ringing, ringing to warn the ship of its wreck-place.

For as on the alert, O seaman, you mind the loud admonition.
The bows turn, and the freighted ship tacking speeds away under grey sails,
The beautiful and noble ship with all her precious wealth speeds away gaily and safe.

But O the ship, the immortal ship! O ship aboard the ship!

Ship of the body, ship of the soul, voyaging, voyaging, voyaging.

—from Sea Drift

3. We Two Boys Together Clinging
We two boys together clinging,
One the other never leaving,
Up and down the roads going, North and South excursions making.
Power enjoying, elbows stretching, fingers clutching,
Arm’d and fearless, eating, drinking, sleeping, loving.
No law less than ourselves owning, sailing, soldiering, thieving, threatening.
Misers, menials, priests alarming, air breathing, water drinking, on the turf or the sea-beach dancing.
Cities wrenching, ease scorning, statues mocking, feebleness chasing,
Fulfilling our foray.

—from Calamus