Following in the legacy of great American baritones, Thomas Hampson is equally at home in the opera house and in recital. His roles run from Mozart’s Don Giovanni to Busoni’s Dr. Faustus. He is a frequent interpreter of the Lieder of Schumann, Schubert and Mahler and a consummate scholar and teacher. This year, Hampson continues his Song of America project, a recital tour in collaboration with the Library of
Congress that celebrates the 250th anniversary of the first published American art song. Hampson was recently appointed the New York Philharmonic’s first artist in residence. He spoke to Listen over Skype from Germany.
Looking at your Song of America project, where does American art song draw from classical tradition and where does it stand apart?
American song is as wide and deep and myriad as American culture can be. I have hung this year on the 250-year anniversary of the first art song in America by Francis Hopkinson, one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence, who sent violin pieces and songs to George Washington and said [apparently in a powdered-wig colonial accent à la The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show], ‘I believe this is the first American thing on American soil.’ And George said, ‘You’re probably right. I’m a little busy here on the Potomac, but I’ll take your word for it because I don’t have an ear for these things.’
Anyway, Hopkinson wrote some nice songs, but my thrust to American song is to be very respectful to the specific genre that is poetry set to music. I have always felt that when we look at song, especially ‘art song,’ or our version of Lieder, we see that we have always been preoccupied to find the best of our composers, the best of the epics and that sort of thing, and I think that’s slightly wrong-headed when looking at American culture. Because if you look at any particular timeframe in American culture and the cross-generational dialogue between, say, an early poet set by a later composer, you find that the creative spirit, this song-writing, this poetry set to music becomes kind of a marker or diary of our culture — America, which is very complex and born of so many different racial and cultural influences in and of itself, becoming America. And that’s the narration or the storyline that fascinates me and that this project is born of. It’s essentially saying what was it like to be alive at any particular juncture
in our country, calling yourself American — whether you are French, German,
Dutch, Italian, Chinese, whatever — regardless of that dialogue, what was it
like to be alive and an American?
So in terms of the classical tradition, I guess the specific answer is certainly we’ve had ‘classical composers’ — however contemporary in whatever time they lived — setting folk music or arrangements of folk music, but we’ve also had an awful lot of people simply taking a poem, trying to identify that poem in that context of psychology, if you will, and framing it in a musical language that either augments the experience of that poem or articulates the very substance of what that poem is. I believe poetry and music to be very much two languages in a dialogue with one another.
And you see that dialogue continuing into present day?
Oh, without question! American song, the American dialogue between poet and composer is as active today as it ever has been. We have some brilliant composers — and I’m not talking about lyrics. I’m trying to make a distinction, because I mean, American song, what the hell is American song? What about the Lomax Archives? What about Carl Sandburg? What about Bruce Springsteen? And that’s valid, that’s terrific, but I’m talking about poems set to music. Of course you can list any number of — Corigliano, Mark Adamo, Richard Danielpour, Ricky Ian Gordon, Ben Moore — you could go through a whole list of very active songwriters, and they’re classical composers writing songs. They’re not setting a lot of folk song arrangements, which I would like to encourage them to do, but they’re writing a lot of songs. American song is blooming like crazy.
Fifteen years ago or twenty years ago, when academia finally got off the back of composers and allowed them to start writing melodies again and polyrhythms, it became a very exciting music. And I think people said, ‘Terrific!’ And we’re starting to rediscover composers like Samuel Barber or John Duke, who I consider to be two of the great masters of American music and American song.
When you speak about academia ‘getting off the back of composers,’ you’re referring to the return of tonality as an accepted practice?
