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Silver Songs
six songs formezzo-soprano, tenor, baritone, and piano
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Griffin Candey
1. Ave Maria
2. The B Movie
3. Scene from Caravaggio
4. Another Plot Cliché
5. The Difficulty
6. The Film
Program Note
Silver Songs (2024) explores our fascination with and relationship to movies — how we see ourselves in them, how we use them as symbols, how we use them as a social space and currency. The cycle really began with Frank O'Hara's Ave Maria, a poem I'd loved for a while for being a quintessentially O'Hara bon mot of American culture, knowing it would make for a big, flashy, campy marathon of a song (beginning, as it does, with a command: "Mothers of America: let's your kids go to the movies!") Several years later, I encountered Kate Northrop's warm and nostalgic The Film, and the theme seemed too rich to resist. These six texts run the gamut from sly and biting (O'Hara) to pensive (Jeanne Murray Walker's heartbreaking The B Movie) to quietly internal (Richie Hofmann's masterful Scene from Caravaggio) to cartoonishly-explosive (Rebecca Hoogs' high-energy Another Plot Cliché.)
A few years later, I wrote a standalone song for the fabulous Mirror Visions Ensemble (a setting of Ada Limón's stunning What I Didn't Know Before,) and during that premiere, the ensemble also performed Tom Cipullo's extremely lovely cycle, Secrets, commissioned some years before for three singers and piano; the format worked so incredibly well in showing many facets of a theme that, when Scott and Grant and I discussed a larger cycle the following summer, I suggested a similar multi-vocalist format. (They responded by allowing me to write for Grant, Abi, Daniel, and Mischa, truly an abundance of musical riches that feels a bit like driving a rocket ship in the very best way.) I cannot thank Scott and Grant (and everyone at MVE) enough for the opportunity to dive into this banquet of poems — they mean a lot to me, and I'm thrilled that we get to share them with more folks via this project.
Movements
1. Ave Maria
2. The B Movie
3. Scene from Caravaggio
4. Another Plot Cliché
5. The Difficulty
6. The Film
Instrumentation
mezzo-soprano, tenor, baritone, and piano
Duration: 23'
First printing, August 2024
Copyright ©2024 Griffin Candey. All Rights Reserved. Program Note Copyright ©2024 Griffin Candey. All Rights Reserved
by Just a Theory Press | www.justatheorypress.com
S I L V E R S O N G S
s i x s o n g s a b o u t m o v i e s — b y G r i f f i n C a n d e y
1. A V E M A R I A
Grandiose, Blustering
69
Double Time — Suddenly Nonchalant
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2. T H E B M O V I E
Baritone
Slowly Lowering Into the Scene = 60
Con!dent, Sensual
= 66 - 72
each 2-4 bar phrase has a "push and pull" — big downbeat, a little push, then a firmer pull back — like waves on a beach — let dynamics and hairpins guide you — continue until marked otherwise
Pno.
softly, colla voce
Pno.
Bitter, Spitting = 66 - 69
snapping back into
broaden
Mezz.
Pno.
Standing Your Ground
Mezzo or Tenor or Baritone
= 69
prologned, gradual accel. to peak tempo at m. 26, returning to opening "manic" tempo
(tempi in parentheses are guides posts to m. 26)
6. T H E F I L M
p o e t r y b y K a t e N o r t h r o p
Bittersweet and Nostalgic
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