Marilyn Nelson Nielson and Professor Murray Eddington Boren, Music

French composer Francis Poulenc said “The setting to music of a poem must be an act of love, never a marriage of convenience.”¹ As I searched for a thesis topic, it was ultimately love for T. S. Eliot’s work that led me to create these musical settings of his text. I have loved Eliot since I was in second grade, when my oldest brother Kenneth memorized T. S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” He recited it for me, and though I did not understand exactly what the poem meant, I was immediately captivated by the mood it set, and by the rhythms and cadences of the words. I looked up the poem in an anthology, and then read all the other Eliot poems I could find. I read two volumes of Eliot’s letters. I read several of his essays. Again, even when the meanings escaped me, I loved to repeat the resonant phrases. The poems were full of voices, “voices dying with a dying fall / Beneath the music from a further room,” “voices singing out of empty cisterns and exhausted wells,” “voices / in the wind’s singing / more distant and more solemn / than a fading star.”

Eliot’s “voices” spoke to me even more as I learned more about the poetry. I eventually memorized “Prufrock” myself. I wrote several critical essays and papers about Eliot’s poems. While studying abroad in London, I visited all of the historical sites I could find that were related to T. S. Eliot or mentioned in his work. I then made my own “edition” of The Waste Land, complete with notes, photographs, explanations, and analysis. I have read Eliot so often that his poems have become part of my consciousness. Their rhythms feel right to me.

T. S. Eliot is ultimately, for me, a musical poet. While I love probing the depths of his allusion and analyzing the complexity of his imagery, it is the rhythm and the music of the words that draw me back to his poems again and again. Even the titles of many of the poems suggest music: “Preludes,” “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” “Rhapsody on a Windy Night,” “A Song for Simeon,” “Choruses from ‘The Rock,’” “Four Quartets.” It is this musical quality that gave me the idea of translating the rhythms and voices I heard in Eliot’s poetry into actual songs.¹

Eliot is in many ways “difficult.” He is much studied, but, perhaps, more feared than loved. In writing these songs, I have tried to make the texts more comprehensible by combining them with the rhythms and music which Eliot’s poems suggest. Like Fauré, I have sought “above all to extricate the general feeling of a poem, rather than to concentrate on its details.”¹ I have attempted to create in music the mood that Eliot’s poetry sets for me. Above all, I have tried to put my love for Eliot into my work. I hope that these songs add another voice to Eliot’s voices, “More distant and more solemn / Than a fading star.”

As I watched my songs come to life, first in my own head, then on the tinny MIDI synthesizerplayback in the composition lab, and finally in Cheri Hancock’s soaring voice, I was continually struck by new relationships between song and poem. Even as I analyzed my own work, I kept finding correlations that had not occurred to me before. Much of the text painting and symbolism was intentional, of course, but often I wrote a passage in a certain way simply because it sounded right. Then, later, as I analyzed the music, I found out why it had sounded right. These were some of the most revealing moments in the whole composition process.

Ned Rorem said “Sometimes [the composer’s] comprehension of a poem is not fully realized until after he has completed the fusion [of text and music]. Speaking for myself, the only poems I’ve ever really ‘understood’ are those I’ve put to music.”¹ I found the same thing to be true for me. Although I think my previous understanding of Eliot helped me know what kind of mood to create in my songs, that very act of creation illuminated the poetry further.

These revelatory moments were extremely valuable to me as a composer. They helped me realize that indefinite feelings can be evoked by definite musical or poetic events, and they helped me become more adept at recognizing which events engender which feelings. With this knowledge, I have more power as both a poet and a composer.

In addition to having value for my own development, I want my art songs to help others appreciate Eliot’s work in a new way. I have tried to add to the poems, not to simply re-state them in musical terms. As Edvard Grieg wrote, “When I compose a song . . . I have tried to let the poem reveal itself, and indeed to raise it to a higher power.”¹ I believe this to be the true value of song. It allows text to be seen in a different light, hopefully one that reveals new insights to the listener. In these songs, I have added my own voice to Eliot’s “voices in the wind’s singing,” and I hope that the blend of these voices will resonate within the listener’s heart as well.

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¹ In A Dictionary of Musical Quotations, comp. Ian Crofton and Donald Fraser (New York: Schirmer Books, 1985), 139.
² My “translation” was in some ways the inverse of a process of which Eliot wrote: “I know that a poem, or a passage of a poem, may tend to realize itself first as a particular rhythm before it reaches its expression in words, and that this rhythm may bring to birth the idea and the image” (“The Music of Poetry,” from On Poetry and Poets [Toronto: Noonday Press, 1961], 32).
³ Emphasis added. Dictionary of Musical Quotations, 160.
⁴ Rorem, Setting the Tone, 308.
⁵ In Dictionary of Musical Quotations, 139.