Downriver
Ann Silsbee and the Creation of
Letter from a Field Biologist
Classical music, as an art form, is rooted in western European traditions. I think it is fair to say that most of the institutions that brought the art form to this country were primarily interested in simply bringing the work closer to American audiences. That is not a fault, just a reality. So to suddenly be asking for more representation is skipping a few steps. Shouldn’t we be asking for more of a connection to the country/city/community in which these institutions are based first, assuming that is what is wanted from patrons (i.e. all of us) who have been happily partaking of what these institutions have offered thus far anyway? (Jonathan Bailey Howard, “How Can Artists Respond to Injustice? Thoughts from Seven Musicians”, New Music USA blog, June 5, 2020)
M.C. Escher – Circle Limit with Butterflies (1950)
My friend and colleague Richard Valitutto recently mounted a superb festival in Ithaca, NY, showcasing the work of composers who have once called this big small town home: David Borden, Sarah Hennies, Robert Palmer, Julius Eastman, and Ann Silsbee. In a way, it seems as if Robert Palmer, who was the Given Foundation Professor Emeritus of Composition in the Department of Music at Cornell for thirty-seven years, was the odd one out, the fuddy-duddy who adhered religiously to the old-school craft of “model composition.” But pianist and poet Adam Tendler, who performed at the festival, has recently discovered in Cornell’s archives notices and documents linking Palmer to Eastman, whose resurgence in new music circles has been the sensation of the twenty-teens, and Eastman to Silsbee. It turns out Eastman was the catalyst for a two-piano piece Silsbee composed called Letter from a Field Biologist, and it was the pair who probably gave the first performance of it. (The surprise is perhaps more that Eastman was simultaneously more fuddy-duddy, more notated, more specific, more traditional, more “institutional,”—hence, more flexible—than the current identity- and politics-forward reception of him, might allow.)
Eastman’s performance partner, Ann Loomis Silsbee, however, has no such current reputation in the music world. She is known today perhaps more as a poet than as a composer; verse would take on ever greater importance in her late-life career. Born 1930, she majored in music at Radcliffe, receiving her B.A. in 1951. She married Robert Silsbee, a physicist who taught at Cornell, and dedicated her life after college to family, stating, “I reveled in every aspect of motherhood for a while; my life centered around kids, full of ordinary everyday details, crises, laundry, small miracles, and tragedies.” Although she would travel from Ithaca to Syracuse University for her master’s in piano, which she received in 1969, it was not until she accompanied Robert, on a year-long Guggenheim Fellowship, to Paris, at the age of forty-three, that she made the move to composition:
I was lonely in Paris. I began to keep a journal in which I floundered and doubted. The fantasies began to play an addictive part in my life; I began to wonder if I was on the way to going crazy. What caused the shift I do not know, but one icy blue morning in January I awoke as if called, clear-headed and decisive, with the realization that I was wasting my life this way, that if I was going to spend my time imagining things, I might as well use my ability to good purpose and imagine music. That day it seemed as if Paris were washed clean and sparkling. During the spring I applied and was accepted into the doctoral program in composition at Cornell.
So she birthed music, her “major art” (as she put it, according to the poet Gray Jacobik in her introduction to her posthumously collected volume Fullest Tide) in 1976, with her quintet Spirals. Music would become her minor art by 1995, when she completed her last piece, her second string quartet. Poetry, which she composed since youth, would push it out, or rather, she would have the courage to bow out of music composition. In 1996, she writes “the monster aspect shows up when I start to think my life task is ‘composing,’ that I have to be a composer, because without composing, something to show, [to] move the world, I am worth nothing…What if I pretended to be someone else for the purpose of these explorations in words?”
She describes how Spirals was created from “improvising with music based on the overtone series, fascinated by the rich possibilities of string instruments, using a free, spatial notation.” I suspect the trajectory of Silsbee’s work after her entrée into the world of “composers” was grounded in less intuition, less improvisation, and more orderings, more composition, in the rigorous orthodoxy of pitch sets, notation, and defensible choices. We see this tension in her journal entries related to the compositional process of Letter from a Field Biologist, completed in fall 1979. The cover of the page reproduces the inspiration for the work, an unsourced letter describing a picnic interrupted by a swarm of butterflies whose appearance verges on violence toward the end.
We were sitting in the middle of a river a few weeks ago eating lunch (on a rock, not in the water) and watching the butterflies. Hundreds of butterflies everywhere: yellow and black tiger swallowtails, some with red spots, and a few red and black ones. At least four or five different kinds, all big, fluttering aimlessly in typical butterfly fashion, or so it seemed at first.
After watching them for a bit, it became obvious that they were all flying downstream: not that just on the average more were going downstream than up, but every single one would first appear around the bend above us, flutter around for a bit, then a short minute or so later disappear around the bend below. Every single one, no exceptions. A river of butterflies. There must have been an inexhaustible supply of them up there somewhere, unless perhaps they were all flying down the river and back up through the woods, and we were really watching the same butterflies over and over again? I prefer to think of them coming out of some spring high on the mountainside like the river; a few of them floating down each tributary stream until they converge in a raging torrent of butterflies….
A dip into the Silsbee archives at Cornell University, at the very end of the pre-Covid era, reveals the torturous process that led to the creation of Letter. Silsbee set to composing the work after returning from a residency at the writer’s colony in Yaddo, New York. (Jun. 12: Home, Yaddo over. Real life again.) The contents from her journal from this time reveal the polyvalent self-talk of the solitary creator who, at any given moment, would rather be doing something else (Sep. 17: have to practice!), yet feels guilt about any sense of procrastination (Aug. 8: Must finish this piece this piece this week; Sep. 18: Where am I now? Could have written this whole piece the other night if I hadn’t gone to bed!… Sep. 23: OK today is clearly full of distractions), who finds herself in the perpetuity of planning (Sep. 14: I am spending hours repeating these things which will take 2 min. in performance; Sep. 18: OK must stop! Don’t know if I really have made headway today. Need to get back to making music), but also ruing the spinning out of systems she has so carefully planned out (Oct. 26: My next piece is going to be unplanned. Really need some spontaneity.), and who finds herself calculating the arrival at the finish line based on current rates (Oct. 4: still only approx. 8 mins of music – if I do one minute a day will be done in 9 days), all the while needing to sustain her career in order to have pieces to write (Sep. 19: Too long on business letters! Not for the a.m.!!!) while ruing some more about the pieces she has already set herself to write.
James Tenney: Raggedy Ann (score found among Ann Silsbee’s papers)
Letter began as a piece called Lepidoptera, for the odd, very Eastmanesque ensemble of three pianos, and it appears to have been composed on request from Eastman for a concert spring of the following year. The current source of the letter is still unknown (I had only begun to pore through her journals when the archives at Cornell University closed in March), but we know that from July 1979 onward, the image of butterflies flying downstream became an obsession for Silsbee, one that she found difficult to translate into a musical language that seems to demand analytical legibility and rigor. Among her self-described “good notions”:
David [Burge]’s butterflies – constant downstream motion of butterflies. This could be the formation of the matrix, with which small colorful events occur, all within the downstream motion:
Entrance of tributaries—“events”
OK What is downstream?—accumulation—of pitches, rhythms + material – a gradual accumulation by all sorts of things into the texture.
She picks up these concerns with renewed fervor in August:
There is in the idea of counterpoint of directions (aha!) whereby the butterflies become more and more numerous (come thick and fast) as the river in toto slows down. Hence—seems as if the river should tend toward slower and longer periods, while the small events (butterflies) accumulate faster).
August 8th, 1979 (Wed.) “Must finish this piece this piece this week. “Minimal” music, from J’s “lecture”—using small units as source of variations—getting the most possible out of very small concentrated bits of music …There are of course more than one or two ways to do this—Julius’ piece works by accumulating A, A+B, A+B+C—within each block of time there are aleatoric var. acc to the particular actions of the performers.
(Riva Lepitoptera) or whatever – small-size signs, like butterflies emerge from upstream—basic principle again is accumulation.
What we witness in the journal entries is an intensive month-long process of interrogating her metaphors and their translatability into music in every aspect, of its textures, directions, densities. It is as if she is attempting the near impossible task of capturing and systematizing all the parameters of poetic sensuality in sound and its notation.
We see that by Sep. 10, she decides on the current title of the work, whose backdrop seems to be taken from an image of Niagara Falls (a source of inspiration, I might add, of Oliver Knussen’s ensemble work Coursing, which was begun in July 1978—I am not implying a connection between the two composers). From the same day:
What is the principal [sic] of a river? Discrete particles fusing – accumulation – coming together – high to low – joining – growing larger – larger body of material (accum[ulation])
Underlying structure – riverbed – harmonic and structure in time.
Butterflies: musical ideas, gestures – distinct from one another
Fluttering + irregular. Coming from upstream and joining together downstream…
A species of b – defined by char, coloristic qualities, interval structures – characteristic movements. A species may occur in diff versions coming from diff pnos.
Motion is varied by inversions, “interversions,” octave displacements
Need plan (i.e.) Riverbed –both tonal and time structure, acc to which this proceeds, events in Pnos 1, 2, + 3 should perhaps occur at diff rates, but underlying large scale struct[ure] is same. i.e. the butterflies pass over the same territory but at different rates and at different times. (canon, actually)—structural canon—the details would be different.)
Series, for the time intervals (are we to work with clocks?)
Effect of series should be to gradually have things accumulate more slowly or faster? (Actually the [ac]cumulation process should happen fastest in the middle + be slower (fewer) at beginning and slower because sluggish with so much weight (serenity) at end – sea – or Niagara Falls ….So what kind of series is that? …
What is downstream? Avoid implying an association between high + low registers + high + low parts of river (up + down river) However it is clear that the Niagara Falls will have a much wider range than the initial first appearance of the butterflies, once it will include them all.
Tonally: seems metaphorically apt for butterflies to have different pitch fields – Niagara Falls will include all 12 (white noise, white light) but on a tonal grounding—which should come clear at end.
Here the idea of a number series onto which the music is mapped fits in with the mystery – where are all the b’s coming from? Why all going downstream? What if ….?
Of great concern to Silsbee was the exactitude with which she would carry out the directives of the scene, which needed to be coaxed into notation with the right mixture of obfuscation and clarity so as to allow the listener her delight at the moment of recognition. What is downstream? How does the riverbed differ harmonically from the butterflies? Would different species of butterflies be related to different pitch-class sets? Would an individual butterfly become the instigator of a new horde (the so-called “butterfly effect” in its consummate literalness)? How would time be kept? Would they have clocks for coordination? Barlines were too rigid, but the spacing of events was of utmost importance to as to highlight the density of figuration as a dramatic feature.
Silsbee’s breakthrough moment came on Sep. 11:
Maybe this is what it needs – i.e. the passing through of one individual of a species – start w short motive – develop it 3, 4, 5, times…Thus individual a’ goes (for example), 256 256, a2 goes for 5, a3 for 5 units. A2 begins in Pno 2 + goes acc its scheme. Great idea—work out tomorrow! There’s the piece, for a while anyway!! So we have the life (within cognizance of letter-writer) of an individual, of the species and of other individual…species.
By the 14th, however, she is skeptical of oversystematizing:
“What about a few mistakes (wandering unrelated butterflies)? Just to confuse things?”
On the 18th, she has heard from Eastman.
Change of plan: Now for 2 pianos – J. can’t get three. Too bad — fewer butterflies. But at least a 2 pno will be useful.
9am: Talked w Julius last night. Must decide before 7 a.m. tomorrow if I am going to get this p[ie]c[e] done. Fears it will never be done haunt me, but I think he will do it next spring so perhaps that is not to worry about. Will be glad, except don’t like to default and don’t like to pass up a chance. But this piece needs more time.
From Ann Silsbee’s personal notebook, Sep. 17, 1979. (Who was Wussy? One presumes a pet cat.) Courtesy Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Library.
After traveling to New York City in the middle of October, she writes on the 26th of the month:
Feel a sense of dismay at having to pick up this piece + go thru the motions… don’t like the feeling of having all the creative work done—painting by number ‘s [sic] what’s left.
But I don’t have to follow the plan! No but this work should have its own aesthetic consistency—what it is the metaphor carried out by means of the plan. But there is the taking over of the phantasy…why not let everything break loose for five mins.? Why not??
The orthodoxy that she has honored—the system she has set up to allow herself to “paint by number”—deeply disturbs her, or at the very least bores her. True composition is, after all, architectural. This does not mean that the work is ready-made for performance, of course, but it does mean that in order to achieve the coveted “aesthetic consistency” labor and time must still be expended to complete the task. And with boredom comes a desire for something more. Spontaneity.
Downriver in Ithaca, New York (April 2020)
I performed the work long before I delved into the archives, and I found it surprisingly easy to put together with Richard, in part because the coincidences between the instruments are incidental. This was not accidental—Silsbee lost sleep over the notation of Letter. Her indecision about the notation of time ultimately led to an economical solution. Yet, I found in Letter a curious mixture of notational over-determination—a symptom I often find in young composers—that suggests a reliance on a grammar of dynamics and articulations without which it falls apart—and mystical under-determination in terms of its overall structure (I was clearly proven wrong by her journal entries). The descent—a long section with staggered tremolos between the pianos—felt like it wanted to go somewhere; this zone of suspension made the final tumble into the deepest registers feel unsatisfying. The piece also felt louder and more chaotic when on the page it appeared it should be, as Silsbee’s words “very loose and fluttery.” But the overdetermination and care evident in the score convinced me it was a piece she must have been labored over intensively. The love and frustration seemed inscribed in the notation. The pages of unmeasured tremolos, for instance, are meticulously beamed and ruled and even the knobbly squiggles issuing forth from them indicating their continuation are rendered with meticulous attention.
The malaise that Silsbee seemed to have felt in her daily work seems to hinge on that very translation of ideas into that watertight (and some would argue highly gendered) type of composition, of single butterflies becoming individual pitch class sets, of pitch class sets needing to relate in mirrored ways. I wonder to what extent it was beaten in that such was the only way to compose at the time. Her notes as the end of the composition was nearing reveal the gilded cage of intense premeditation: “Why not let everything break loose for five mins. Why not??”
The experience of listening to Letters seems to exist in an uneasy space between the types of “audiotopias,” to borrow Josh Kun’s formulation, which I find in Messiaen’s bird pieces, in particular Catalogue of the Birds. There, the hyperornithological work is combined with a personal, idiosyncratic sonic translation of emotions (“joy of the blue sea” being a lightning bolt of A major), the scene-by-scene music of the opera or ballet that often eschews formal unity for dramatic continuation. I wonder to what extent this needed translation of subjective emotion is written into Letter. Or, do emotions emerge within us listeners as the result of a well-directed, well-choreographed tableau? All I wish is to hear Ann in all this. What I bore witness to in her notebooks seemed to have been a process of self-erasure rather than self-composition.
Ann Silsbee (date of photograph/photographer unknown)
I don’t mean to say I think Letter fails. It scintillates and billows and is thoroughly successful in its structural mission as outlined in the notebooks. But I can’t help but feel a burden on it all. I feel no such heaviness in her poetry. She had attended her first poetry seminar at Cornell with A.R. Ammons in summer 1968, in the middle of her master’s years, and in 1996, began to attend more poetry workshops, more poetry festivals, joined and hosted poetry groups, and from 2000–03, hosted retreats from women poets. Her collections Orioling (Red Hen, 2003) and Book of Ga (CustomWords, 2003) come from the end of her double-tracked career. Jacobik writes, “Knowing that Ann Silsbee’s musical knowledge, both as a performer and a composer, was extensive and profound, will naturally predispose her readers to attend to her use of musical terms” but that what draws Jacobik to her work is “her subtle translation of this knowledge into intricate soundplay, rhythms and cadences.” Both Jacobik and the poet Baron Wormser find a sonic sensuousness in her poetry, a love of alliteration, nature, and the daily world.
What I sense in the poetry is this element of love, joy, fullness and resplendence. I am certain she labored over her poetry, but there is simply so much more of it. It poured forth. There is less of a burden expected of each poem to carry the weight of a whole idea. In Book of Ga, her final collection, from 2003, she celebrates the life of her grandmother through a highly original assemblage of imagined viewpoints and vignettes. The sum is, as in her compositions, of small units, varied. In the final poem, “Learning to Weave,” she describes her grandma, whom she calls “Ga,” as
river in my own life’s continent,
the Ohio coursing the gut of our Midwest,
flowing from our northern past to pass through
and disappear downstream …
My river talks in her voice. She won’t forget me
singing through my lines, nor will I forget
the woman who made me before I made her up.
Who’s who? Downriver, we’ll both be silt.
To return to Silsbee’s own question and answer to herself, What is downstream?— a gradual accumulation by all sorts of things into the texture. Silsbee’s poetic world made her compositional world, which flowed and fed back into her poetry as she made her return to it. There, she found herself, accumulated. ⫷ [Jun. 22, 2020]
