Whitman Songs, for baritone and orchestra
Michael Tilson Thomas was born December 21, 1944, in Los Angeles, California, and lives primarily in San Francisco and in Miami, FL. He composed the first of his Whitman Songs, “Who Goes There,” for Thomas Hampson in 1993, completed the set in 1994, and revised the score in 2023. Thomas Hampson gave the world premiere of the version for baritone and piano at the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam in May 1998 and the premiere of the original orchestral version with the San Francisco Symphony, Michael Tilson Thomas conducting, in September 1999. Hampson gave the first performance of the revised version with Tilson Thomas and the New World Symphony in Miami in 2023. These are the first Boston Symphony Orchestra performances.
Whitman Songs calls for solo baritone plus an orchestra of flute (doubling piccolo), oboe, clarinet, bassoon, 2 horns, 2 trumpets, trombone, percussion (chimes, glockenspiel, crotales, xylophone, ship’s bell, triangles, anvil, suspended cymbal, small tam-tams, vibraslap, wind machine, snare drum, tenor drum), harp, piano, and strings (first and second violins, violas, cellos, and double basses).
Although Michael Tilson Thomas grew up in Los Angeles and has long been regarded as a civic institution in San Francisco, where he helmed that city’s orchestra for a quarter century, he first came to broad attention on the East Coast. In October 1969, a month into his tenure as an assistant conductor with the BSO, he took the reins of the Boston Symphony on short notice, substituting mid-concert for ailing BSO Music Director William Steinberg. Further performances and a promotion to the position of associate conductor quickly followed, and Tilson Thomas soon had ample opportunities to record with the BSO. The repertoire featured on those early discs already revealed a distinctive podium vision: in addition to scores by Tchaikovsky and Debussy, the twenty-something Tilson Thomas led the BSO in vigorous recordings of music by Yankee iconoclasts Charles Ives and Carl Ruggles, as well as of substantial yet under-sung compositions by their countrymen Walter Piston and William Schuman. This would prove to be a harbinger of things to come, since one of the distinguishing achievements of Tilson Thomas’s nearly sixty-year conducting career has been his deep investment in, and sensitive performances of, music spanning almost the entire stylistic spectrum of U.S. compositional activity.
Perhaps this should come as no surprise, because Tilson Thomas has always been a composer. But since his own compositional proclivities were long at odds with the aesthetic values he absorbed during his apprenticeship, when he embraced the international modernist lingua franca of the 1950s and 1960s, he did not prioritize his own music for many years. Today, Tilson Thomas recalls: “For a long time I measured the degree of respectability of a work by the amount and the intensity of the dissonance it contained. […] I truly believed then that [the avant-garde] was the only valid direction for the future. As my own musical impulses were melodic and expressive, I left my own writing behind.” It was only starting in the late 1980s when the encouragement of supportive colleagues and the ascendance of alternatives to avant-gardism (like minimalism and neo-romanticism) prodded Tilson Thomas to return to active composition for the public. In the years since, he has balanced his extensive conducting schedule with work on a small number of carefully fashioned scores, many of which showcase his abiding fondness for the human voice and his years of close study of its manifold expressive capabilities.
Written in 1993 and 1994 for baritone and piano and orchestrated a few years later, Tilson Thomas’s Whitman Songs testify to his voyage of compositional self-discovery. Of his personal history with the poetry he set in this score, Tilson Thomas states:
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’s 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.”
It bears noting that what “being an American” meant for Whitman has long been a subject of intense debate, given his often fraught and seemingly self-contradictory views on slavery and race relations. Still, the most familiar and, indeed, the most generous interpretation of Whitman’s vision of “being an American” places the emphasis on his conviction that U.S. democracy was a protean phenomenon that would “contain multitudes,” and through which a sometimes-discordant patchwork of voices, points of view, and value systems would nevertheless achieve a kind of cosmic oneness. Something of this sensibility pervades Whitman Songs’ compositional language, which Tilson Thomas describes as “a blend of several American styles, including folk song, rock and roll ballads, and lyrical Broadway.” But if Tilson Thomas’s stylistic pluralism and his absorption of influences from popular and demotic sources is distinctly Whitmanesque, it is also very much in the spirit of one his most important mentors, Leonard Bernstein, with whom he developed a close and enduring bond in the 1960s as a Tanglewood Fellow.
A setting of lines from an early version of “Song of Myself,” “Who Goes There?” takes up Whitman’s reflections on the metaphysical puzzles of selfhood and the nature of equality in the young U.S. republic—in particular, the poet’s pantheistic beliefs about the permeable barrier between self and other, as expressed in his assertion that “In all people I see myself none more and not one a / barleycorn less.” Tilson Thomas refracts Whitman’s reflections in a setting that counterposes the baritone’s wide-eyed questioning against indifferent, sharp-edged orchestral textures dominated by dry punctuations of pizzicato strings, piano, and mallet percussion. At other moments, however, the orchestra amplifies the baritone’s nonplussed musings; sometimes, it even seems to goad him on.
Tilson Thomas describes the dreamy, atmospheric “At Ship’s Helm” as a “lyric intermezzo,” and its text comes from Leaves of Grass’s maritime-themed “Sea-Drift” sequence. The sea was one of Whitman’s favorite subjects, and for him its fluid, amorphous course and vast horizons symbolized the oneness and indivisibility of creation, while also summoning up a kind of unquenchable wanderlust. Correspondingly, Tilson Thomas’s setting uses a broad range of nautical tone-painting that evokes not only the ocean bells and rocking waves specified by Whitman but, in addition, marine gusts and seagull calls. As the setting’s final lines make clear, the sea also functioned for Whitman as a symbol for life’s course, the choppy waters of which would be traversed by the “ship of the body, ship of the soul.”
Around the time he was immersing himself in Whitman’s poetry, Tilson Thomas began his relationship with his husband and partner of now almost fifty years, Joshua Robison. Given that another of Whitman’s major themes was same-sex desire and male-male intimacy, reading him in the late 1970s would have offered Tilson Thomas a second answer to the question, “Who am I?” That answer would of course have been: “I am a gay man.” This is made explicit in the third of the Whitman Songs, “We Two Boys Together Clinging,” the text of which is taken from Leaves of Grass’s “Calamus” sequence. (The “Calamus” sequence contains some of Whitman’s most important statements about homosocial attachments.) “We Two Boys Together Clinging” features a memorable main tune that would be at home on any Broadway stage, although Tilson Thomas also characterizes the setting as a march-like “crescendo of determination and strength.” In this respect, it can be heard as an affirmation of gay pride composed during an era—the tail end of the AIDS crisis—when the very survival of gay pride was under threat. The setting’s mix of tenderness and jaunty optimism also pays tribute to the music of Bernstein and Aaron Copland, both gay men whose guidance was invaluable in Tilson Thomas’s quest to “fulfill his foray.”
Matthew Mendez
Matthew Mendez is a Palo Alto, California-based musicologist and critic who specializes in 20th- and 21st-century repertoire. He received a Ph.D. in music history from Yale University and is currently a postdoctoral fellow and lecturer at Stanford University. Mendez was the recipient of a 2016 ASCAP Foundation Deems Taylor/Virgil Thomson Award for outstanding music journalism and was also a Tanglewood Publications Fellow.
Composer Michael Tilson Thomas on his Whitman Songs
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
