Here, Bullet
Instrumentation: baritone and piano
Duration: 18 minutes
Author: Brian Turner
Commissioner: Here, Bullet Global Commissioning Consortium
Premiere Performance: Rolling premiere performances by a consortium of 30 singers during the 2019-2020 Season
Prizes: First Prize 2020 NATS Art Song Composition Competition
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PROGRAM NOTES & SCROLLING SCORES
1. Here, Bullet
“Here, Bullet” is radically innovative poetry— firsthand poetic descriptions of 21st Century warfare by an established poet at the height of his powers. I approached this work with great respect and trepidation, seeking ways to amplify the raw, visceral power of the poetic descriptions. The music starts tentatively, then the pace picks up at measure eight with an ostinato in the piano part mirroring the language in the poetry “Here is the adrenaline rush you crave”, crystalizing in a musical gesture the fear and crazed excitement which drives the piece to the very end. The descriptive beauty of the poetry is highly charged (“Here is bone and gristle and flesh...here is the clavicle snapped wish...that insane puncture into heat and blood”). I sought a musical language steeped in expressive dissonance coupled with an angular vocal line to pair with the beauty and horror of the verses. There is a kind of musical arrival at the lines “... here is where the world ends every time”, which then leads directly to the final plaintive calling out for the Bullet in a mixture of horror, defiance, and even resignation. This is poetry unsparing in its intensity.
2. Eulogy
“Eulogy” might just be my favorite poem in Brian Turner’s collection. It’s deeply personal, and there are few topics more personal than suicide (especially when the victim is a fellow soldier with the poet serving in Iraq).The poem starts with a description of a seemingly normal outdoor scene (“tower guards eating sandwiches...) which soon hints at something darker - the tragedy of Private Miller taking his own life as the reactions of nature and wildlife unfold around him.
Nineteenth Century Romantic poets idealized Nature, so I paired this poetic scene with musical choices that one might find in a mid-century Romantic work by Chopin or Mendelssohn. The poem simultaneously presents two completely dichotomous scenes (Nature vs. Private Miller’s suicide)—in a similar manner I used two contrasting arpeggiated harmonies in Db Major and e minor as the musical basis for the setting.
As the centerpiece of the poem, Private Miller gets his own leitmotif—for this I used more rapidly changing, traditional harmonies in an attempt to call to mind a kind of bastardized version of a Bach chorale. I imagined the solemnity of a chorale, providing honor and respect to the chaos of the situation, especially important considering that Turner tells us in public interviews that Private Miller wasn’t properly recognized among the honored dead upon their return from active duty. (It should be noted that a version of the leitmotif reappears in the setting of “Curfew” at the appearance of another individual who deserves our sympathy—Sgt. Gutierrez remembering the act of comforting a man who cupped bits of his friend’s brain in his hands.)
As the music builds to a final climax, we return to the sweeping Romantic arpeggios that bring us back to Nature in all its unsettling Romantic glory.
3. A Soldier's Arabic
A poem that begins with a translation of the word ‘love’ into Arabic, as we find in “A Soldier’s Arabic”, demands a more self-consciously lyrical approach. The poem has no obvious or implied descriptions of violence, giving us a momentary pause from descriptions of the trauma of warfare. Spoken text is very important to this setting, with the poet himself telling us “Speak the word for death...” and later
“This is a strange new kind of war where you learn just as much as you are able to believe.” —Ernest Hemingway
“To be spoken, it must be earned”. As a composer I love the special kind of urgency created when spoken text floats over music, so I was happy to comply. Reciting the text in its entirety as a kind of coda pays homage to the rich tradition of poetic recitation, and is a fitting end to this wonderfully ambiguous poem.
4. Curfew
Trauma and incredibly vivid descriptions of violence are never far off in Turner’s poems. Even when the scene is at its most benign and idyllic (as it is in “Curfew”), a memory or a potential disaster is right around the corner. So a picture of bats flying out at dusk, water snakes gliding in ponding basins, policemen sunbathing on traffic islands, even children helping their mothers is of course juxtaposed with a linguistic negative: an announcement that Sgt. Guitierrez did not comfort a man who cupped pieces of his friend’s brain in his hands. These are poems from the Iraq War by a poet who saw it all firsthand - this is what we should expect.
The mood I created in my setting has a marked sense of timelessness using static harmonies, an exaggeratedly slow tempo, deep and rich harmonies, and subtle color shifts that underscore the feeling of ease at dusk. We hear ease to match the scene, but violence and trauma are never far off, referenced by unexpected stabbing rhythmic gestures in the highest registers in the piano. The lyric and the languid are adjacent to the dissonant and the discordant—in art as in life.
The music we hear when Sgt. Gutierrez is mentioned is a direct reference to the music we hear when Private Miller is introduced in the second song (“Eulogy”) earlier in the set. Both characters are associated with more traditional diatonic chord progressions that change on every beat - I had in mind a bastardized version of Bach chorales (with their rapidly changing harmonic rhythms) one might hear as part of a funeral service. The use of a unique leitmotiv with each character underscores their importance and shines a light on the human costs of the war. Here is where the abstract becomes personal.
Another musical technique I used in this setting is the use of musical ciphers to spell out names and important parts of the poem using a code based on the musical alphabet. In public presentations of his poems, Turner speaks of the injustice when a Colonial addressing the troops at a parade ground neglects to name Private Miller among those killed in Iraq, perhaps because he died by suicide and not a “soldier’s death”. Turner writes a poem about Private Miller as a way of honoring his colleague; putting Miller’s name in a cipher and giving him a leitmotif associated with human suffering is another small way to recognize and honor the memory of all soldiers who perished in the war. So ‘Miller’ gets spelled out musically, the same way ‘Love’ gets spelled out, referencing the first line in the poem “A Soldier’s Arabic” (“The word for love is written from right to left...”)
There is an emotional trajectory in the set that moves from trauma to a kind of acceptance. The first song Here, Bullet ends with the repeated refrain “Here Bullet!”—the last song also ends with a repeated refrain, but this time the repeated refrain is “Today!”, referencing not bullets and violence to the flesh but instead the absence of bombs, panic, and the idyllic scene of white birds rising from the Tigris.