Interview transcription of Nicholas Bell interviewing Elijah Daniel Smith about his work “Songs of War”

 Q: Elijah, where were you born? 

A: Chicago, Illinois. Born and raised.

Q: Did you live in Chicago most of your life?

A: Up until I graduated high school and then I went to University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign for a year for voice, and I hated every second of it. So I transferred to the Boston Conservatory to study composition. Then I moved out to Los Angeles to do film scores and I hated every second of it, so I came to Peabody.

Q: So you started college at 18, didn’t like it, bounced around a little bit, when did you come to Peabody?

A: I started in the fall of 2018 when I was 23.

Q: And you are working on your master’s degree in composition?

A: Yep, studying with Oscar Bettison.

Q: Were you always interested in composing?

 A: To a degree, I guess. I’ve always written music but I never thought about doing it as a career until I was already in my undergrad and then I realized that composing is much more appealing to me than singing the same arias and songs for the rest of my life.

Q: So you go into music originally through choir or vocal music?

A: No, actually my great grandmother was a pianist for silent films back in the day so she sort of introduced a little bit of musicality to my family. Then my mom actually majored in piano performance for a couple years at Michigan State University before changing majors but, as a result, we always had a piano in my house when I was growing up. So I started tinkering around on that when I was about five years old and my mom put me in piano lessons, which I also hated, so I stopped taking them but kept playing on my own. Then I started playing guitar when I was ten years old and played in bands for a while. And then I found out about this brand new public performing arts high school in Chicago called The Chicago High School for the Arts and I wanted to go for guitar but they didn’t have any spots left, so my mom convinced me to audition for voice. So I took a few lessons and auditioned with what I now realize was horrendously inappropriate repertoire and I somehow got in. And then once I started there, I realized that it was a classical voice program, which I didn’t know going in, but at that point it was too late and I figured it would be good for me anyway. Once my band split up when I was sixteen I realized that I actually really liked classical music and decided that I was going to go all in on that, so that’s how I ended up studying voice at UIUC.

Q: So you’ve done a lot of different genres and different types of performance then?

 A: Yeah I’ve bounced around and explored quite a bit.

 Q: Since we’re talking about your “Songs of War” in particular, which is a song cycle, is there any connection that you have with the poets from whom you took the text? Did you know about them before or did you did you come up with the concept for this piece and look for poetry about that?

A: That, it was definitely that. Funnily enough, I was reading this book called “What Are You Looking At?” by Will Gompertz, who was the director at the Tate Modern at the time of writing the book. And I was reading it for a 20th century art class that I was taking at the time and I was going through the chapter about the futurists, which was a group of primarily Italian painters who lauded modernity and industrialism, but they also supported the idea of war, to a degree, as a way of wiping the slate clean and giving us a chance to start over, which I thought was pretty naive and ignorant. But sadly enough, some of them got their wish and ended up fighting and dying in World War I, which was this really bleak and kind of tragic thing. I also really like this video game franchise called Battlefield, which is another first-person shooter, and they had recently come out with Battlefield 1 which was a World War I game that really tried to emphasize the tragedy of the war and how, at the time, it was unlike anything anybody had ever seen. It was, at that point, the most devastating conflict in modern history and the game tried to give you these short stories about individuals and their fictionalized stories so the player can really try to understand the loss of life on a more personalized and individualistic level. So I kind of had all of this World War I stuff floating around so I thought it might be interesting to write a song cycle about it. So I started looking for WWI poets and I found a bunch of men, primarily, but I also saw that there were a bunch of female WWI poets, who had a completely different perspective on it. And the way they wrote about it was so drastically different from the way the men wrote about it that they might as well have been talking about two different things. So I thought it would be really interesting to highlight that contrast by having a baritone and a mezzo and also try to highlight the way in which all of these people were so gung-ho about war and nationalistic when they were back home, thinking it was going to be this great heroic crusade and then they got to the battlefield and all they wanted was to die after a while. So I wanted to heighten these really dark and depressing poems written by a bunch of men who ended up dying shortly after writing them, and these hopeful poems written by these women who wanted their men to return home. There was something heart-wrenching for me to be reading these sorts of farewell poems where the poets are almost predicting their own deaths that then shortly came. Almost like they had come to terms with it and just wanted to get it over with.

Q: That’s a heavy topic. So then about the music itself, setting aside the text, do you have a particular compositional style in general? And does this piece fit in to that style?

A: Yeah I guess I do. I write emotional music, to put it plainly. I love absolute music and music just for the sake of music, but I don’t find it satisfying to write that way because music, for me, has always been a means of expression. That being said, this piece was the first piece I wrote when I was sort of transitioning to the way I’m writing now. Which I guess could be described as pitch-centric and harmonically dense, but I don’t really buy into the idea of having to have a particular style or lineage or philosophy that I have to stay true to as much as I just try write what I think sounds good, and what I enjoy listening to. So a lot of this piece is kind of “pan-tonal” and diatonic but a lot of it also isn’t and the layering of those two concepts in this piece was the beginning of me exploring different harmonic palettes, so to speak.

Q: So we know how you picked the text, you wanted to do a piece about WWI, but what was the genesis for the work itself? Was it a piece for your studies or something on your own?

A: Yeah it was a student piece I guess. Having been a singer for a little while I’ve always loved vocal music and I knew I wanted to write a song cycle, but I didn’t want it to be a Schubert style song cycle or anything, and I didn’t want to be just a collection either. So I knew I wanted a narrative of some sort, so I decided to try and craft a narrative out of these pieces that follows the deterioration of the psychology of the male singer or protagonist and how he goes from being almost excited to go to war and how he eventually gets to the point of just wanting to die and nothing else.

Q: What kind of vocalists would you recommend sing this piece? How advanced is it technically and who would be right in these two roles?

A: That’s a great question. I think for the baritone, a heavier voice. I have more of a character type than a voice type in mind. None of the songs are really all that challenging technically, or at least I don’t think so, but the idea of having this traditional and stereotypically masculine image, the big broad shoulders, chiseled and prominent jaw line and a big chest and all of that, I thought it was really interesting to watch that image break down and fall apart as the character starts to crack. Watching this big, over-confident manly-man fall apart in front of your eyes and ears. I don’t really have a strong preference for the mezzo, though. The woman who sang it is more of a light-lyric mezzo and she did a beautiful job with it and gave a little bit of a sense of innocence to it, if we’re going off of traditional operatic associations, but I wouldn’t be opposed to a heavier voice.

Q: Have you had a chance to hear this performed in its entirety?

A: Yes.

Q: Did it turn out the way you wanted it to?

A: It was interesting, it was at my senior recital. Whenever you write something like this, the singers are always going to interpret it a little differently than what you have in your head when you’re writing it. Just because their life experiences and associations will be different from yours. At the time I wasn’t super picky about smaller details and I didn’t really force them to sing it a certain way through dynamics and articulations and performance instructions. So they, at times, took it in a very different direction than what I would have done which I was open to and happy with because when I heard it sung and interpreted differently than what I had imagined, I started to think about the music and text differently myself, which is a sign of a good performance in my opinion.

Q: So in general, as a composer, would you say you’re open to the artists taking the music in an interpretive direction that they feel is right even if it contrast with what you originally conceived? Or is that more specific to this piece?

A: I think I’d be more open to that with vocal music. I leave a little less leeway and interpretational freedom in my instrumental music for that through use of very specific and frequent indications, but I want performers to really feel like they can still take the piece and make it their own and feel as though they’re playing something that they’re connected to rather than trying to perfectly match a bunch of instructions on a page because that’s just boring.

Q: Do you have any particular song that you would consider to be your favorite?

A: Yeah the sixth song, technically number five, is “I Have a Rendezvous with Death” and the poem is by Alan Seeger. It’s the last song that baritone sings in the cycle. Before I even wrote a note of any of this, I spent about a month with all of these poems, just really trying to get inside them and explore them so I could feel as though I really understood what they were about, not just on the surface, but what they were alluding to and tied to deeper down. And this poem was my favorite of all of the poems because of the subtle things that Seeger did to drive home his point. So the poem is entirely about him knowing that he was going to die and envisioning that. He personifies death and he reminisces about some beautiful moments in life that are so specific and detailed and they just brought a smile to my face and filled me with this peaceful joy only to slip back into this hopelessness and this acceptance of the end and that all of that happiness and beauty was over and would never happen again. And knowing that that’s exactly what happened, he died shortly after writing this poem, breaks my heart every time I think about it. Each stanza is longer than the last to really give you the sense, as the reader, that he felt as though life was dragging on and on, or at least that’s how I interpreted it. I tried to really capture that rollercoaster of emotion through this sort of monotonous pulse and repeating motif when singing the title line, to this almost aria-like material when reminiscing. I also noticed in all of the poetry that the female poets often wrote about wanting their loved one back, while the male poets who fought in the war wrote about just wanting to die with a similar sense of desire and longing. So to showcase that, I used the same leitmotif when the mezzo sings about love as I did when the baritone sings about death, and because this song is second to last, the listener has had enough time to really pick up on that motif’s association. This song is the only time that the baritone sings that motif when talking about love, not just death, and I tried to imbue that moment with a sense of post-romantic drama and expression, only to wash all that away when the thought of death comes back. So to me, this poem and song is really the crux of the entire cycle. It brings you from the highest highs of the piece to the lowest lows in the span of a few bars and shows the way in which the war just broke him down as a human being, and how even if he had survived, he would never have been the same.

Q: When you’re writing for solo vocalists, how much weight do you place on the text and how much weight do you place on the music itself? Can you have on without the other and have them still function?

A: Well the poetry can obviously function on its own, but the music can’t. The music is meant to be an extension of the poetry, and a heightening of the text so without the text it wouldn’t make any sense in my opinion. The heart and impetus of the music would be gone and thus the meaning of its existence would also be gone. Why set the poetry to music if the poetry itself is unimportant? I might as well write instrumental music at that point.

Q: Earlier you mentioned how this piece is more similar to how you compose now, do you see your compositional language changing in the future? Obviously you’ll grow, but do you think your language will change?

A: Yeah it’s happening right now and it sucks. It’s great, but it sucks because it’s considerably more difficult to write. I’m constantly trying to make sure I’m not falling into habits or defaulting to techniques or tendencies so it’s challenging to make sure every single idea is being explored and employed to its fullest potential. And so I think I scrutinize every single note in a way that I never have before and, simply because I’m improving, and I have higher standards and expectations for myself. I don’t ever want to write the same piece twice, or have two pieces sound the same. I don’t want people to hear a piece of mine and say “oh, that sounds like a Elijah Daniel Smith piece” because I don’t want to be predictable. So I’m always trying to force myself out of my own box and think about every single piece as its own entity. When I write a piece, I feel like I live with that piece for however long it takes to write, and that it’s always with me, following me around and bouncing around in my head, and I try to understand it and find out what it naturally wants to do and where it naturally wants to go, rather than forcing it to do something that it doesn’t want to do. Of course, there are times when it’s interesting to force a piece to do something it doesn’t want to do, but I won’t understand how to do that unless I understand what it does want to do.

Q: How long did it take you to write this from conception to actually having the full score finished?

A: From conception to the very end, probably about three months. I spent about a month just thinking about it and conceptualizing and two months writing it. I’ve always been able to write songs relatively quickly just because the arc of it and the structure and the emotional core and idea are already there. There’s something to work with already and I don’t have to start everything from scratch, if that makes sense. Those things are already implied in the poetry so it’s not that it’s out of my control, or that it’s already determined, but there are implications and suggestions to work with. But finding the right material to build on was the most difficult part, as always.

Q: What do you want people to take away from this performance? What do you want them to be thinking or feeling?

A: Yeah, I want them to feel terrible at the end of it. I guess it goes back to the idea of being able to experience an emotion without having to actually feel it, I want them to experience all of the emotions present in the piece, but I don’t want anybody to leave to hall actually wanting to die. But I do want them to feel the weight of the subject matter and the words. Some of the words in this piece are the last things that these men ever wrote down and I want people to really understand that these are, in a sense, the real last words of real people.

Q: Working with such heavy material for months, did it affect you at all in the process?

A: Absolutely, the more time you spend reading and thinking about death, the more you’re going start thinking about it involuntarily. Going back to what I was saying earlier about pieces always being in my head and being inescapable, those existential thoughts crept in quite a bit. On a beautiful day or something I would be thinking about how these people would have experienced that day completely differently at the time of their writings, you know? Like “Oh this is such a beautiful day, I can’t imagine how it would feel if I was surrounded by death, anticipating the moment that I’m violently killed, myself.”