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| Artists: | Mike Heffley |
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| Title: | Nine Medieval Troubador/Goliard Songs |
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The Professionally Amateur Music of Mike Heffley
by Yul Agee Manu
continued from...
Heffley wrote:
These songs, originally in Latin, from the 11th century, I sing in English to composed/improvised synthesizer accompaniments. The CD stems from several musical challenges and concepts:
1) how to sing slowly, delicately, and out of time with force and passion;
2) how to make substantial music on an instrument that is prone to sounding like a toy (the synthesizer with presets designed to simulate conventional acoustic instruments, as well as some "new-agier" alterations of such sounds);
3) how to improvise a harmonic, rhythmic and timbral universe from nothing but a melody line (which is how the whole Western thing developed, when you think about it).
This first of his two early Western music CDs is also the earliest CD of the grad school years, and the only one of the fully available CDs begun in the Master’s program. The second was done almost a decade later, but its material is both closer historically to that of the first than his other music (the 16th-century Elizabethan songs are five or so centuries later than the Troubador and Goliard songs, from roughly the same part of the world and people, expressing much the same kinds of concerns and affects, of the joys and sorrows of romantic love. The earlier repertoire speaks of that notion at its birth in the Western soul, the latter to its more refined, and less innocent, maturity).
a. Quan lo rius de la fontana (When the flow of the fountain) (Jaufre Rudel)
Hearing this, I see a man approaching the middle of his life, sitting in the ruins and ashes of his pasts, from which the flowers of his futures are budding. I know the things lost inform the way he eyes and approaches the new things; more acutely, I know his faith in both song and verse transcends both the despair and the hope in his circumstances.
He sings beyond meter, in the arc of a breath; melisma is simply his voice at speech. His words convey simplicity, trust, and openness. I know this is a new venture for him, that he has listened to much of this repertoire in recordings by the conservatory trained, and that he is consciously eschewing their historistic premises and styles to make up his own as he goes. These are his true blues, visceral and personal in their melancholy.
His previous work as a musician was in (roughly speaking) jazz, Western art music, and American folk-blues contexts, and he is working here after the fashion (albeit amateurishly) of Sting, the Hilliard Ensemble, Jan Garbarek, Keith Jarrett and similar giants of one milieu plying their voices and connecting distinctively to another.
I know, too, that his synthesizer accompaniments to his vocal renditions were improvised on layered tracks overdubbed in real time, over the course of a week in a studio, around the clock. Knowing this makes me listen to the chords and lines and rhythms with ears like a bat’s, wondering how many “takes” it took before each and all came together.
Listening so, I notice that the form of each song is irregular, asymmetrical, in keeping with the a capella voice at their core singing a melody unconstrained by meter’s beats or harmony’s rules, from one moment to another in time.
These observations, gleaned from the first track, a scant minute or two long, hold true for all the tracks to come. The interest those songs command as they follow lies in their distinctions of lyric expression and meaning, and the musical reflections and extensions of same.
In this first half of the track, he’s told us that for him to sing is as natural as the day is long or short...
b. Sic mea fata (By singing I ease my fate) (Latin love song)
...now he tells us more about the nature of that fact. As the swan sings near death, he is singing now because life has left him cold and high and dry, and it is time for him to die. What’s more (v. 2), he was brought to this sorry state by love gone bad. It might have been a good long marriage that ended or widowed him, or the latest and last in a string of failed affairs; whatever the cause, the effect is the death of love in his life, and therefore, he feels, of life, period. (Coincidentally, this recording was done around the time his only child, daughter Geneva, whom he had raised as a single father, had come of age and left his nest.)
Having told us all this, he plays a lovely little improvised solo out...like a bad actor (but nonetheless a good musician) dying onstage, declaiming his swan song indeed...
c. Non es meravelha s’eu chan (It is no wonder that I sing) Bernart de Ventadorn
...and comes back in with a magic golden harp to expound much further on that tragic theme. Yes, dear hearers, it is no wonder that he sings better than all others, because he is the most slavish slave of love, and therefore born not only to die of same, but to sing ever more perfect renditions of life’s one (swan) song as he does so.
The harp is magic, I hear, because it starts out in the same static passivity of his plaints and moans, but then gradually takes on a life of its own, growing more animated with every moment’s notes. This is a step forward from the first track, where music and words were joined at their hip. Now they split off, amoeba-like, and the music is the livelier force, palpably sustaining a voice and statement that would consume itself in depression and grief without that force’s infusions. It is Heffley’s right hand, finding its way around the full chromatic spectrum of overtoning potentials suggested by the action of the melody through its mode.
It is a motion that climaxes with the end of the long discourse on love’s cruelties, then subsides back to the still waters it began as.
d. Westron wynde (Western Wind)
It is a motion that has taken the singer off from shore to sea, despite himself. It has changed from water to boat on water...a boat starving for wind in its sail manned by one thirsting for water to drink, rather than sail on. He’s escaped the grave death-grip of his obsessive grief, but is pining for lost love no less as he floats away from its corpse.
Left and right hands are re-grasping their initial egalitarian balance, only now more interactively, more dynamically. I hear here the seed of the unique and unpredictable way they will come to work together in Heffley’s mature piano improvisation style a decade later.
e. Douce dame jolie (I’m lost in adoration) (Guillaume de Machaut)
Ah, and then the wind does arise, with a sudden slam—along with the realization of his situation, in full force. He’s lost at sea, with no way back...he’s no less fatally wounded by love at sea, on bark, than he was ashore...and he is completely at the mercy of the wind to complement his oarsmanship in his quest to survive—which has kicked in even more fulsomely than his desire to die—by finding his way back to (new) land.
The music on this track serves as both that rowing and that wind. It is the highest marvel of this gem of a CD. Heffley spent more time on the music of this than on any other tracks, not because it was most difficult but because it was most fun. Each take was a little more fun (and better) than the last, until the one he knew at last fulfilled the song. The marvel of it was that the most simply fun produced the most musically profound.
It developed a little more with each pass. Starting out as little more than a shadow of the melody being sung, it took on the wild and rangy rhythms and harmonies of a late-20th-century string quartet. It would have been of much interest as such, but because it was improvised rather than composed, and improvised on nothing but that scrap of a repeated verse, it stands as a statement of the intellectual-historical glue that really does connect plainchant and medieval song to the Lieder of the Second Viennese School—and of that same glue as it connects composition with improvisation, tradition with innovation, in that same history.
My mind’s eye sees the man safely through his trials of depression, confusion, loss, desperation; the muscle and wind of this track have gotten him to the firm ground of the next one.
f. Como poden 1 (Let us sing 1) (from Las Cantigas de Santa Maria, King Alfonso X)
Both words and music proclaim this overcoming. The rhythmic and timbral edges and energies of the Machaut chestnut rejuvenated are here, without the sickly filigrees of both words and music it inspired. The improvisations here are more like a sudden rain squall, or a jangle of sleigh bells, than like the surest touches of Schoenberg or Webern in the previous track. They mark the real breakthrough into health and recovered path after the planting of both feet again on (the) dry land (of the New World). Keeping with the Western intellectual/historical-glue image, they bring in all the storms and showers of noise and soundings unpitched, unmetered, unsystematized that the 20th century brought in to Western music, both through jazz and the era’s composers.
g. De moi dolereus (Of my sad self I sing to you) (Gilbert de Berneville
Ah, but if he didn’t have no bad luck, he wouldn’t have no luck at all. As it was when he sat in his ashes, then on his boat, then when he stood and then trod back in the land of health and of hope, so was his fate the same: no love. No woman. Why? Just because. He knew well what he was missing...this song is void of longing or complaint...it just states the fact of the fate. Some do meet this destiny; he sings himself to be one. Alone...more keenly so, now in strength and health and even joy than when in broken shadows. (The keyboard is coming together in a more conventionally professional way here; this is the first of these songs that might work on a pop music chart.)
h. L’homme armée (Man at arms)
The soldier’s calling has drawn in many such men. Here he glances at that temptation...but his better side and judgment warn him away, and all others who might overhear. This is probably the second track that would work commercially.
i. Des soltu clein geniessen (The rotten cheeky devil)
Here he seems to turn on all disrupters of hearth and home, peace and love, with the vehemence of all good men who see the worst evil in themselves. He has met the plundering warrior, the accuser and saboteur of all that is holy and good in the company of men and women he feels himself cut off from—met them both in himself. It takes all his strength and will just to surrender to the opposite of them instead of to them.
j. Quant je sui mis (When I go my girl to see) (Guillaume de Machaut)
Now he mocks the lover in himself as well. The gentle, affectionate renunciation of romantic love is a far greater sacrifice than the grim one of the more malign parts of himself...but he cannot get around it, must go through it, without lingering.
k. Como poden 2 (Let us sing 2) (from Las Cantigas de Santa Maria, King Alfonso X)
And so the work is done. As he did when he overcame his initial loss and grief, now he sings the same song of triumph over his ruthless confrontation with his own imperfect nature. The music is wilder this time, and also farther beyond time, into that place of the hidden thrown...
Still and all, that CD is only one life. Its solutions won’t suffice for those to come, even though its problems are the same...
continue to...
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Tracklisting of HR012
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