Scott Ordway

PREMIERE

Commissioned by Emily Marvosh

Premiere: 12 March, 2023. Cary Memorial Hall, Lexington, MA. Presented by the Lexington Symphony.

NOTE

In his Symphony No. 3 (1896), Gustav Mahler creates an elegant framework for understanding the relationship between spirituality and the natural world that inspired and sustained him. After a monumental first movement evoking the beauty and terror of nature, he ascends by steps through five ways of knowing the world: the distinctive wisdoms of flowers, animals, humanity, angels, and love.

What You Tell Me (2023) is a companion piece to Mahler’s third symphony and is scored for alto voice and piano. The text is based on an extended conversation between me and alto Emily Marvosh—who commissioned and premiered the work—in which she discussed her relationship to each of the themes proposed in Mahler’s symphony. Working from a transcript of this conversation, I extracted and adapted the poetic text for the song cycle.

Although I took each line of the text directly from our dis- cussion, the final poem is shaped considerably by my own interests and sensibilities, as well as by my desire to fashion a concise and concentrated poetic text out of a wide-ranging conversation that lasted more than two hours. The authorship, therefore, rests somewhere in between Emily and me.

Thematically, the piece treads ground that is important to me and which has always attracted me to Mahler’s work: the elevation of everyday experience to a state of beauty, the powerful emotional resonance of small details, the profound lifelong importance of childhood memories, and the connection between nature and my own spiritual experience.

MEDIA

TEXT

Six poems in response to Gustav Mahler
by Scott Ordway, after a conversation with Emily Marvosh (2023)

1. About Summer

I grew up with summer.
August: a sun-drenched blast of air.
This is what summer is.

It was gorgeous. It was pure:
That smell like last year's pine.
But I don't remember it.
I don't remember anything.

I went to the airport, and
I left the airport and went to
Another and went home.
It wasn't the same.
It's not the same.
Summer is not the same.

I go back home,
I drive those straight mile roads.
No more houses in the in the forest.
I remember hearing her on the phone:
Too young to understand that
Parents cry all the time.

2. About Flowers

You have to grow it from seed:
Wait for it to spread,
Wait for it to grow,
Wait for it to come up.

They start so young.
Just learning they need things.
The garden needs things.
Growing things need things.
We need a new idea:
We have water
And we have time.

3. About Animals

I stayed at their house.
Not the house in the city:
Farmland, not trees.
I felt all alone in this house.

It's such a strange noise:
They were out there somewhere.

It was the end of the day.
It was so quiet.

It was hard to go to sleep
Because it was so quiet.

4. About Humans

Look out of the window of the airplane:
All gold and red.
You see where the
Edges are straight.
The color of the city is different.

How much we are capable of!
Making land out of nothing!
We have created so much, but
It could all be underwater.
You have to restore it.

We have so much between us.
There is so much that we are, that
People do for other people.
We cannot be alone.

5. About Angels

No-one talks about them.
Like the hand of God,
There's no way to understand.

It’s just me and him.
And he says: “sing me a song.”
And so I sing.

Did he help me?
Did he save me?

I did not forget you.

6. Love

It is so slow:
Two things grow
Roots into each other.

Imagine when it has to end.
Less of a person:
A poor partner and a
Poor daughter.

Trying to get there,
Trying to go home.

And how is it?
How is your life
Different now?

Maybe I'm wrong?
I have always been loved.