I'm Nobody, Who am I?

Boukje van Gelder

Student Number 3169227 Supervisor(s) Andrew Wright Title I'm Nobody, who am I Research Question My research question is too long for the form. Summary Emily Dickinson's poetry can be hard to understand the first time you read it. How then can the artist communicate an Emily Dickinson poem in a song in a way that an audience grasps the meaning the first time? For that reason, you need to define who you are on stage and what you want to communicate. But what do you communicate on stage when your first sentence is 'I'm Nobody!'? This research turns Nobodies into Somebodies and the other way around by looking at the voices (the characters) that are present in the poems of Emily Dickinson, specifically the poem 'I'm Nobody!'. Who speaks to whom? The research makes a journey from Emily Dickinson to scholars who write about her, composers who make songs on her poems and in the end to the performer who with all these people in her mind communicates the poem and the song to the audience. Finally, the voices in the poem become defined as various characters that can be performed on different settings of 'I'm Nobody!' by Ernst Bacon, Nick Raspa and Lori Laitman. From something vague and ungraspable the poem and its voices become very concrete and close to our own daily lives. Short Bio Mezzo soprano Boukje started singing as soon as she could speak. After her Bachelor’s in History at the Utrecht University, she decided that she wanted to explore as much as possible about singing. In 2017 she graduated from the Fontys Conservatory in Tilburg and started her Master's in the Royal Conservatoire. Currently, she studies with Catrin Wyn-Davies. Boukje performed as a soloist in different concerts. She sang, for example, the alto solos in Bach’s St Matthew Passion, Haydn’s Stabat Mater, Rossini's Petite Messe Solennelle and she sang the role of Hänsel in the staged opera of Hänsel und Gretel from Humperdinck.

VIDEO 1: 'I'm Nobody' every sentence separated for each composer.

5. The Three Compositions

To select the musical settings there were a few conditions:

· The music needs to be available for purchase and shipping to The Netherlands

· The music cannot be very expensive

· The vocal range must be suitable for mezzo-soprano

· The instrumentation preferably piano or maybe one or two other instruments.

· The music must be an art song.

In the end, I decided on the following three settings:

Ernst Bacon is one of the major Dickinson composers of the last century, but he is not so well known as, for example, Aaron Copland. He made two settings of ‘I’m Nobody’, easily available on the website of Classical Vocal Reprints. I chose the one in Songs from Emily Dickinson: Vol.3 (Edited by Karen Bishop, DMA).[1] The songs are for voice (medium-high) and piano. Bacon is a very important figure in Emily Dickinson’s musical settings, and therefore I am happy to work on one of his songs.

The second setting was the setting of Lori Laitman in Four Dickinson Songs (Lower transposition for Mezzo). This song cycle was originally written for soprano and piano, but the composer also made a version for mezzo-soprano and piano. Laitman is a well-known American composer and the music was available on Classical Vocal Reprints.[2]

The last setting is ‘I’m Nobody’ from Nick Raspa. He only wrote two times for piano and voice and in The Netherlands, he is a nobody. It is nice to discover some new repertoire and it looked well thought out on the poem, which is very important for this research.[3]

Word stresses

Most sentences you can say in different ways if you change your tone or the stressed words, to see how Dickinson’s sentences flow in the three compositions I wanted to make a more systematic overview of the way the words are used. Here is the scheme of the stresses of the words.

Laitman	Raspa	Bacon
I'm Nobody! Who are you?	I'm Nobody! Who are you?	I'm Nobody! Who are you?
Are you - Nobody - too?	Are you - Nobody - too?	Are you - Nobody - too?
Then there's a pair of us!	Then there's a pair of us!	Then there's a pair of us!
a pair of us!
Don’t tell! Don’t tell!	Don’t tell!	Don’t tell!
they'd advertise - you know!	they'd advertise - you know!	(They'd banish us, you know.)

How dreary - to be - Somebody!	How dreary - to be - Somebody!	How dreary - to be - Somebody!
How dreary
How public, How public - like a Frog -	How public - like a Frog -	How public - like a Frog -
To tell one's name - the livelong June -	To tell one's name - the livelong June -	To tell your name the livelong day
To tell one's name - the livelong June -
To an admiring ,an admiring, an admiring Bog!	To an admiring Bog!	To an admiring Bog!
I'm Nobody! Who are you?
Are you - Nobody - too?
I'm Nobody!Don’t tell!

From this scheme, a few things already stand out. They’re highlighted, so it is easier to find them. Most of the stresses are quite similar as they are very natural. Raspa and Bacon even used the same rhythm in the sentence in the yellow cells.

In the green cells, you can see how Laitman likes to play with the stresses of the words. When she repeats the phrase (something Dickinson doesn’t), she changes the word that’s stressed the most. With ‘Don’t tell’ it feels to me like she is emphasising the warning. With ‘To tell one’s name the livelong June’ she emphasises the exasperation.

The red cells show a very important difference between Laitman and the other two: where Laitman stresses on the common syllable ‘no’ and ‘some’, Raspa and Bacon stress on ‘bo’ instead. This gives the meaning of ‘somebody’ and ‘nobody’ the literal version of having a body or not, the existential question if to be or not to be. Laitman uses this stress only one time. To stress on ‘bo’ changes the interpretation of ‘Nobody’ from being a ‘commoner’ to being ‘not a person’. ‘Not to be’ sounds a lot darker to me than to have no importance.

I recorded all the sentences in a row (see Video 1), using the scheme, but adding dynamics and tone. I experimented with saying the sentences with different emotions, trying to get the stresses that each version used. When doing the experiment with saying the sentences with the music in my mind, For each composer there were different kind of emotional impulses. With Raspa, it became sarcastically very easy, because of the slow tempo, with Laitman happy and a bit rushed and with Bacon the overall tone was soft. In this way, the word stresses directly make an interpretation of the song and that helped with defining a character.

Musical atmosphere

The musical atmosphere is very important when considering what kind of character you want to use in your interpretation.

Bacon

Bacon uses a 4/4, 6/4 time signature. The piano plays all the time the upbeat to the next beat, but without stressing specific beats. This makes you lose the time signature. The rhythm of the voice varies a lot, making the song feel shifty. There is no tonality, but it is not atonal as Bacon uses V-I-connections and a lot of chromaticism, giving direction to the song. Which direction it is, stays a question. There is something doubting and mysterious in the song. The chromatic movement of this song is mostly downwards, sometimes the piano climbs up, only to go more down again afterwards. The voice is in the middle/low register all the time, there will be no piercing volume, which fits with the dolce that’s stated in the beginning. This Nobody isn’t a person that likes to make him- or herself heard.

Laitman

When the intro is played, you immediately feel a completely different atmosphere from Bacon’s. It is a bit like a happy Disney-song starts. It feels very light. When the voice starts singing, you can hear it has nothing of the doubting nature that Bacon’s song has. It is almost as if the person is dying to make him or herself heard. Laitman sometimes repeats Dickinson’s phrases to give them more emphasis. She is the only one that doesn’t use the stress on Nobody and together with the lightness of the music, it is like the character in her song likes her position as a Nobody and makes fun of the people that are the Somebodies. The second stanza starts a little bit darker, the piano is minor and the voice starts very low on ‘How dreary to be Somebody’. But the playfulness comes back soon on the next phrase ‘How public, like a Frog’ and stays for all the ‘admirings’ Laitman writes. Then she has an extra part in which she repeats the first phrases in a 5/4 beat “with a slight limp before beat 3”[4]. This part is more questioning, like Bacon’s. Also here she stresses on ‘Nobody’, like there is suddenly some insecurity in the character. It is like the character withdraws him- or herself at the end of the song. But the piano contradicts that with a sforzato major chord.

Raspa

Then there is Raspa. Nick Raspa isn’t well known as a composer. At least not in the Netherlands in classical music. It is atonal and has a very high tessitura for a mezzo-soprano. But it has a lot of theatrical elements and it gives a very nice contrast to the other two songs. It is written for piano and voice, not for voice and piano. This has probably to do that Nick Raspa is a pianist.

The piano here introduces the start of the voice, that starts with a crescendo, like coming from nowhere. The changes in this song are very abrupt: It goes from forte to piano, from whispered again to forte, from small tonal parts to atonal, from the piano and the voice going along together to them going their separate ways. It has a grotesque feeling, like the character wants to say something very important. To give the other a warning.

[1] Ernst Bacon, “I’m Nobody,” in Songs from Emily Dickinson. Volume 3, Songs of love and sentiment, ed. Karen K. Bishop (Fayetteville, AR: Classical Vocal Reprints, 2013).

[2] Lori Laitman, “‘I’m Nobody,’” in Four Dickinson Songs (Fayetteville, AR: Classical Vocal Reprints, 1996).

[3] Nick Raspa, “I’m Nobody” (n.p.: NJR Music, 1998).

[4] Lori Laitman, “‘I’m Nobody,’” in Four Dickinson Songs (Fayetteville, AR: Classical Vocal Reprints, 1996) 11.

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