Words and Music

My first year of college was spent plotting away at a series of unpromising string quartets. In my impressionable young mind, the first step to becoming a great composer was to write a decent quartet. I had ambiently absorbed this notion because my colleagues and I didn’t study rhythms or words in music school, we studied notes, and what better way to write notes than to put them on four staves and call them violin one, violin two, viola, and ‘cello?

My quartets, weak imitations of Bartók, weren’t good. One weekend, frustrated, I took a walk around Manhattan, where I found a dog-eared copy of T.S. Eliot’s Prufrock and Other Observations at Mercer Books. It dawned on me that I'd like to try writing a song.

Within a few days, I had produced a setting of Eliot’s clever, slightly sophomoric Conversation Galante for baritone and piano. In my composition lesson that week with the late, great Ruth Schonthal, she perked her head up from what must have been months of extremely boring lessons and said, “You know, I think you have a knack for this.” I abandoned the quartets.

I realized that I am a vocal composer. Since then, most of my moments of musical inspiration have come from the combination of words and music. Much of my music, even purely instrumental works, has been inspired by literature. In retrospect, this makes a lot of sense. I grew up an avid reader, and anyone who has met me knows I’m a big talker – a chiacchierone, as my father would say. Words and music became inextricable.

A seminal moment in a composer’s development is when their music starts to sound like them, and not a hodge-podge of influences. For me, this moment came when I was working on my first opera, Invisible Cities (2009-2013), based on the Italo Calvino novel. In the opera, the protagonist, Marco Polo, describes the city of Isidora:

Isidora, therefore, is the city of his dreams: with one difference. The dreamed-of city contained him as a young man; he arrives at Isidora in his old age.

The challenge was to write sensuous yet rueful music. My solution:

A soprano sings a wordless melody
Marco Polo sings about Isidora
A second soprano sings a seemingly identical melody
Polo sings the above-quoted line, and
At this point, these two melodies are sung on top of one another, revealing that they are quite different. This symbolizes the distance between youthful desire and arriving at it too late to enjoy it – the conceptual distance is rendered as literal dissonance.

Many years later, I still delight in fusing words and music, while now adding electronics into the mix. My latest large-scale work, Beaufort Scales (2023), for eight treble voices and electronics, adapts the wind force scale of the same name that’s still in use today.

This scale, split into 12 ascending sections, is unusually poetic for a piece of meteorology. The whole thing is only 200 or so words, and my setting was meant to be a little over half an hour. With so few words and so much time, my older notion of “match text to a melody” – which had gotten me this far – wasn’t an option. The melody, the accompaniment, and the electronics all had to emerge from this text.

The first proper step of the Beaufort scale opens with the words “Ripples with scales.” In setting these words, I ran each voice through a custom-built effect I wrote in Max. Unsatisfied with the simple analogy of a ripple, I wanted the voices to be ripples. The effect was like looping, but faster: Each successive loop overlaps with the prior. The voice whispering the word “ripples” sounds neither purely human nor electronic, and it becomes an ostinato with enough depth and texture to sustain the movement.

Thirty-five minutes of abstract weather descriptions seemed overly literal to me, so I interspersed four interludes. I used short texts from some of my favorite books that discuss weather: Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, Melville’s Moby Dick, Anne Carson’s Plainwater, and the King James Bible. Carson’s text, the third interlude, describes her stay in a hotel in Burgete during a rainstorm. She imagines a hotel made of water. I, accordingly, wanted a voice made of water. I used convolution reverb to run the voices through a recording of a water fountain I took while a fellow at the American Academy in Rome. Convolution is the multiplication of two sounds together to create a third. It’s normally used to get a resonant-sounding recording. When I multiplied a voice and water, I created an aqueous, surreal world of sound that envelopes the live voices.

Each step of the Beaufort scale becomes increasingly violent and turbulent, so I was surprised to read the final step’s text: The air is filled with foam and spray. Something about it seemed zoomed out, like the end of the world. I thought about how the technology I’m using to make this music (and write this essay) is likely leading to some kind of weather catastrophe. So, when writing the final movement, I downsampled all the voices to create a distorted, almost 8-bit sound. In downsampling, the algorithm needs to guess where a sample would be between the samples. The result is a distorted, messy sound made possible by an accident of modern technology, much like climate change.

I can’t imagine my life in music without words – they’ve guided my musical direction at every step of my career. After failing to write my freshman quartets, I managed to write one in 2017, fifteen years later. The only way I could do so was to let the words of Lydia Davis – I have learned what art really is: / Art is not in some far-off place – carry me.

Christopher Cerrone (b. 1984) is internationally acclaimed for compositions characterized by a subtle handling of timbre and resonance, a deep literary fluency, and a flair for multimedia collaborations. Balancing lushness and austerity, immersive textures and telling details, dramatic impact, and interiority, Cerrone’s multi-GRAMMY-nominated music is utterly compelling and uniquely his own. He is on the composition faculty at Mannes School of Music and lives in Jersey City with his wife. christophercerrone.com

Editor’s Note: This was a special guest essay but if you’d like to read more you can check out Anna Heflin’s 2021 interview with Christopher Cerrone and Timo Andres here.