“…yada, yada, yada.”
written by Jonathan Mitchell
Bahlest Eeble Readings Cycle 14 Fellow
“The long path from material through purpose to creative work has only a single goal: to create order out of the desperate confusion of our time.”
-Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, architect
I. “...from material…”
It’s 2018. Professor Smith points me to Ralph Vaughan Williams’ Five Mystical Songs, musical settings of religious verse by George Herbert. Gabriela Lena Frank visits the Blair School of Music for the first of several times that year. For my senior recital, I have the idea to write a large cycle of piano pieces—wordless songs, maybe—inspired by Chicago’s architecture. (Pick a topic already, Jonathan.)
I spend weeks researching my favorite buildings and the architects behind them. For example, Frank Lloyd Wright loved the music of Bach and designed a house for a man named Bach—this piece might almost write itself. (Great! Get started!) Another movement might use the structure of the John Hancock Center as the basis for a musical canon, a composition that literally imitates itself into existence. (Enough talking—write!) I give imaginary interviews about this masterwork that I’ll start just as soon as—
I run out of steam.
Of the twelve planned pieces, I’m only happy with one. That composition, itself a frantic cycle through several loosely connected themes, is the one I share with Gabriela during our private lesson. She says she can hear my voice in those five minutes of music. (But you don’t hear it, do you?)
Gabriela then tells me about GLFCAM for the first time. Within the week, I abandon my Chicago project. For months afterward, I fixate on only the third of Ralph Vaughan Williams’ Five Mystical Songs.
II. “...through purpose…”
It’s July of 2021. I’m in an exciting new relationship. For the first time since college, I feel things I desperately want to express in music. (Alright, you big ol’ softie. Let’s get to work.)
With renewed zeal, I look to my favorite song cycles. I’m stuck on Schubert’s Die Schöne Müllerin and Winterreise, with their delusional narrator who sees his emotions reflected in the landscape around him. But there’s also Sufjan Stevens’ Illinois, a passionate—if surreal—autobiographical love letter to the great state of my birth.
The new idea comes to me in bits: a song cycle, loosely based on my life, set amid the architecture I love, paying homage to the cycles that inspire me. In some ways, it feels like a second shot at that Chicago project. I go back and forth with myself over the need for lyrics. Why not write my own? (Because you’re not a poet.) What’s stopping me? (You not being a poet.)
So I work out the structure from beginning to end: twenty-four interconnected songs split amongst four seasons. Each song is presented by an obsessive (and familiar?) narrator as he observes a particular building, landmark, or natural feature of Chicago. At each site, he sees mirrors of his own mind, reflections of his own history, prophecies of his own future. These poems see first, second, thirtieth drafts.
After a while, the narrator looks a little too recognizable. (Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental, I’m sure.) Regardless, I won’t compose a note until I’m satisfied with the texts. (Start making some music!) I can’t have good songs until I’ve got good poetry. (Make. Some. Music.)
But after a few months, I’m exhausted. I’ve finished all twenty-four poems, I can stand maybe ten of them, and only three of those feel worth (finally) setting to music. These three Chicago songs, re-arranged for baritone voice and string trio, are what I decide to work on for Cycle 14 of GLFCAM’s Bahlest Eeble Readings.
Still fixating on that third Mystical Song, I eye my copy of The Complete English Works of George Herbert. (What is it with you and the number three?)
III. “...to creative work…”
It’s January 30, 2022. The Cycle 14 composers have our virtual session with Matthew Worth, the baritone we’ll be working with. I ask him to sing a few lines of one of my songs and he kindly obliges, offering tons of helpful advice. The excerpt is brief and unaccompanied, but for the first time, this Chicago architecture song cycle project feels real. (It’s nice to have actually written some music for once, isn’t it?)
March 6. “If you really want to move forward with these pieces,” Gabriela tells me, “the performers can make them work.” (She means they don’t work yet.) “I think you should take another look at these before you submit them.” (It’s what you need to hear, y’know.)
March 13. I start from scratch. (Again?) In need of a text but no longer confident enough to use my own, I return to that third Mystical Song.
It’s a setting of Herbert’s poem “Love,” his third piece with that title. 133 pages earlier in The Complete English Works, I find the other two. The three poems are convenient for a short-notice first draft and the words sound nice enough but I’ve only got a couple weeks to write this music from scratch and I just need to start it already and why can’t I just start things and—
(Whoa, Jonathan, breathe. Count to three. Listen for once.)
In Herbert's first poem, I hear someone grateful for all that came before, singing a heartfelt ode to the vastness of creation.
In the second poem, I hear someone resigned to whatever comes next, submitting himself to fate in a fiery sermon on inevitability.
And in that third poem, the one that began it all, I hear someone trying to make sense of both past and future but not yet ready to live in the present. It’s only through direct conversation (with “Love”, with God, and/or with himself) that he begins to find meaning right here, right now, in the boundless intimacy of the ordinary.
I almost think I hear a little bit of myself in it. (Took us long enough.)
Having finally made the connection, I then plan to write my own three “mystical songs.” I follow that link until something else clicks. What ensues are among the most productive conversations I can recall.
…then, “confusion…”
Jonathan Mitchell is a Chicago-based composer. He studied classical composition at Vanderbilt University’s Blair School of Music with Michael Slayton, Michael Rose, Stanley Link, and Carl Smith, and graduated in 2019 with a Bachelor of Music in Composition. Since then, he has worked as a Content Creator at Edify Technologies, Inc., composing music and leading curricular development for Edify’s educational app MusiQuest.
Jonathan has had works performed by various players at the Blair School of Music; by Harvard University’s Choral Fellows, under the direction of Carson Cooman; and by La Banda de Conciertos de San José, under the baton of Thomas Verrier. He has also worked as a musical arranger and workshop leader with El Sistema Nacional de Educación Musical (SiNEM), an organization based in Costa Rica. Outside of composing, Jonathan spends his time listening to classic soul music, writing short bios, and trying to find pants that fit.