Marvelous Pursuits

Composer-in-residence Judith Shatin relishes the sounds—all sounds—of the world in which we live. Combining her interests in natural sounds with their manipulation by means of electronics, Shatin has received commissions from around the globe: creating musical installations to celebrate important cultural and historic spaces, composing music for film, and working with a myriad of ensembles. She is not averse to more traditional inspirations, such as musical predecessors and great poetry, both of which help explain the genesis of her chamber piece, Marvelous Pursuits.
Marvelous Pursuits is a setting of Barbara Goldberg’s poetry cycle of the same name, in a scoring for vocal quartet and piano four-hands. Stimulated by a sentence concerning a man with two mistresses that Goldberg noticed in an eighth-century Japanese Pillow-Book, the poetry is a post-modern take on love and desire. It shows them to be partial, temporary, Byzantine. It plays with the biblical command not to covet thy neighbor’s wife and with a man desiring his own wife only when someone else displays interest. The cycle is by turns whimsical and barbed, delightful and treacherous as Goldberg tells the story of a man who gives up his two mistresses and returns to his wife, suddenly dear because of the piano tuner’s desire for her. Shatin adds the following remarks on the work’s origin:

I was drawn to these poems for their ironic content, sonic wordplay, dramatic structure, and lively musicality. The internal rhyme in such pairs as mistresses/tranquility; gaily/daily; kitchen/perfection; tart/ marzipan; and sherry/Vespers suggested musical designs that could amplify the sounds and content of the words. The dramatic structure, with its varied character groups and the epiphany of the man’s return to his wife suggested musical dénouement as well. My instrumentation was inspired by the Liebeslieder of Brahms. Marvelous Pursuits was commissioned by the New York Festival Chamber Players and premiered by them on a program that also featured the Liebeslieder at the Huntington Museum in Huntington, New York.

(c) Jason Stell and Judith Shatin