Love Lyrics: the Intertwined Crafts of Poetry and Song - Cadence Chung

Being both a classical musician and a poet, I often straddle an interesting divide between art forms. The poets I meet at various book launches have often never seen an opera and tentatively enquire if they have captions these days (which yes, they do—I certainly don’t speak Italian!). The worlds of poetry and music sometimes seem shrouded in mystery, impenetrable forces to anyone outside of them. One of my friends, who is also a musician and poet, jokes that among poets, we’re musicians, and amongst musicians, we’re poets.

Despite this, there are a lot of similarities between the two crafts. Being so ancient and established in the Western canon, they’re often thought of as dead or irrelevant. Perhaps this is just a hangover from the Romantics, but it seems that many depictions of the composing or writing process show hermit-like figures who sit in rooms and frenziedly create their art. Paintings of pivotal composers like Beethoven show him scribbling feverishly, surrounded by crumpled pieces of paper. Whether or not these depictions were true doesn’t even really matter—they add to the mythos of the 19th-century tortured artist archetype that still seems to linger.

​However campily Romantic these ideas are, they do touch on a truth of the two art forms—that they both require a huge amount of labour. Creating something from nothing is already a difficult task; and then the something you create has to seem natural, as if sprung from the Muse. A melody must seem like it has come suddenly into being, while a poem must seem somehow spoken, oratory. Whether or not the poem truly is personal, it always has to give off the impression that it’s autobiographical, ad-libbed, or private in some way, despite its highly crafted origin. As Yeats said, “A line will take us hours maybe; / Yet if it does not seem a moment’s thought, / Our stitching and unstitching has been naught.” And dare we forget the root of the word ‘lyric’, coming from ‘lyre’? The earliest poems in classical antiquity were performed as songs, and it’s only due to their notation being lost, or not written down at all, that we’re left with just the words. The ‘lyric I’ that we mention so much in poetry is a self that is made song-like; confession and imagery are heightened beyond the realms of ordinary speech.

Much like in this ancient Greek tradition, I spend most of my studies at the New Zealand School of Music singing poetry. Earlier music from the Baroque period is mainly set to religious hymns; French Mélodie are rife with Symbolist poets like Paul Verlaine and Théodore de Banville; and when you get to mid-century English art songs, which are my personal favourites, you could be singing anything from Emily Dickinson to T.S. Eliot, or even Bill Manhire and Cilla McQueen. Song settings have a unique status in the Western Art Music canon. Nearly every composer has made an attempt at the genre, but few are successful—despite being sometimes thought of as a ‘less serious’ genre, there is a lot of skill required to write a setting of poetry. It requires a comprehensive understanding of the voice as an instrument, as well as the ability to create sensitive accompaniment for the voice and to set the words in a way that respects both the text and the performer. The German composer Franz Schubert is often considered to be the master of the German Lied (literally meaning ‘song’), and the way he follows the words is remarkably subtle—he’s well known for using tiny, almost unnoticed shifts in the harmony, tilting towards the minor or the major in conjunction with the speakers’ moods.

One of my all-time favourite pieces to sing is the Cabaret Songs cycle, composed by British composer Benjamin Britten, set to poems by W.H. Auden. The two met in 1935 and collaborated on many films, plays, and songs, with Britten setting Auden’s words to music. Many of the poems that Britten set were unpublished, written specifically for Britten to compose to, with the process being deeply collaborative. You can certainly tell this when it comes to the way the songs are set; the words are lifted from the page and taken even further beyond their initial lyricism. Rather than being necessarily a transformation, a musical setting of a work is almost a translation of the poet’s intent, bringing it closer to what Ben Lerner calls the ‘poem in the dream’—the lyric ideal that we all strive for.

The song “Johnny” from the Cabaret Songs exemplifies this sense of translation, each section a new pastiche of various musical genres. The first stanza, which speaks of the narrator and her lover in a valley by a “deep river”, is a pastoral tune, using pentatonic scales to emulate a folk song. High trills in the piano represent the “birds up above”, and Britten assigns a distinct tune to the Auden’s repeating phrase “[Johnny] frowned like thunder and went away”, thus setting it up as a refrain both musically and lyrically. The second and third stanzas speak of various outings: the second stanza emulates the dance-hall chiming of the “charity matinee ball”, while the third stanza is a trip to the “Grand Opera”, with big leaps and flourishes for the singer in a gauche operatic style. When, in the fourth stanza, Auden’s character describes the waltz “[throbbing] out down the long promenade”, the piano, of course, plays a waltz, with steady chords in 3/4 time. And when she promises that she’ll “love and obey”, Johnny’s frowning like thunder and going away launches the song into its final funeral march, low and growly in the singer’s register. Each verse of Auden’s original poem is illustrated musically—each location, person, and object is registered in the musical language that Britten uses.

It is this tradition that so often inspires my work, especially my own settings of poetry. As of writing this, my most recent composition is a song cycle for tenor and string quartet set to work by Jackson McCarthy—who is perhaps my version of a modern-day Auden, if I dare to call myself Britten. Each song is based on a different myth, both imagined and historical. I had a lot of fun thinking about how to translate Jackson’s words into musical form: in the first song, a “rabbit beside the windowsill” becomes trills in the viola, while a “knife-slip” translates to a sharp clash between the two violins. The angels who “put up their swords” in the second movement are represented with a sudden major shift, imitating Baroque church music. I had the most fun with the third movement, a poem set in America, for which I used a folky riff in the cello, imitating American folk music to add to the fable-like quality of the poem.

Finding little moments like this in the poems is what makes composing so entertaining—and also so utterly intuitive. Each poem already contains music within it, and a composer’s job is to bring it out. A setting of a poem is the poet’s work viewed through the composer—what they made of it, what they thought was important, what aspects they chose to bring out. As a performer, too, another layer of interpretation is added on. Discovering why the composer chose to highlight certain words, or figuring out what each musical motif is illustrating, is a huge part of a classical musician’s job. Whether or not we realise it, we are constantly analysing texts.

​I hope I continue to work with my peers in this way—both the poet and the musician in these sorts of interactions learn so much about how each others’ work is perceived. When I put on my concert Cud-Chewing Country in July 2023, which showcased new musical works inspired by poetry from Aotearoa, I was struck by how inspiring it is to see contemporaries working together and enriching each others’ work, in the same way that Auden and Britten did several decades ago. The audience at that concert was a mix of poets and musicians, and bringing the worlds together like that only showed how intrinsically linked they are. People often compliment my poetry by calling it ‘musical’, but really I think every poem is musical, in that it seeks to transform speech into something higher, to heighten itself beyond the fragmented utterances that make up most of our day-to-day lives. We present an emboldened, lyric version of ourselves: when speaking fails, we sing.

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Cadence Chung is a poet, composer, and singer currently studying at the New Zealand School of Music. Her nationally-bestselling chapbook anomalia was released in 2022 with Tender Press, and her anthology of young artists, Mythos, was released in 2024 with Wai-te-ata Press. She also performs as a classical soloist, presents on RNZ Concert, and co-edits Symposia Magazine, a literary magazine for young New Zealanders.