Lucy Shelton:
A Gourmet Guide
to Modern Song
Words: Amber Evans
On December 15, the legendary soprano Lucy Shelton will present a “tasting menu” of composers with whom she has worked extensively over her decades of performing, including Elliott Carter, Jacob Druckman, Miriam Gideon, Shulamit Ran, and George Rochberg, as well as composers of whose works she provided the first major or complete recordings—songs by John Cage, Ruth Crawford, and Igor Stravinsky.
Now in her 75th year, Shelton is a direct link to many of the most important creative minds of the 20th century. She continues to be a proponent of musical and vocal experimentation through her performances and her extensive teaching and coaching in New York City and throughout the world.
In advance of Shelton’s performance, National Sawdust Log invited Amber Evans – an exciting young Australian soprano, conductor, and composer presently blazing her own trails as an entrepreneurial singer, collaborator, and curator in New York – to talk with Shelton about her career and the program she assembled for her recital, presented as part of a series National Sawdust hosts in collaboration with Open G Records.
NATIONAL SAWDUST LOG: My first question to you is whether you would mind giving Log readers a little bit about you that isn’t so easily found on Google?
LUCY SHELTON: Well, I think I’ve known from a very early age that my life would be in music. It was what gave me the most pleasure. It was a community. I discovered in high school, at music camp, that it was the way I best communicated: not having to find my own words, but being expressive with the music that composers had written down. I played the flute, and it was through playing the flute that I discovered. this. Plus, singing has just always been something I’ve done with my family. I come from a big family. My parents met at an amateur music camp in the ’30s. Music for all of us kids… there were five of us, and we all took piano lessons. we all had an instrument, we did a lot of family music making. So it’s always just been a fun way to be with people. [Laughs]
I’ve always loved the challenge of the newer music—I mean, it was never a separation of, “Oh, golly, now I’m going to do some new music.” It was all just a continuum. And actually, the first professional job I had was early music, with [Chorus] Pro Musica.
So, from first your first professional job being in early music, but new music always being integrated throughout your life, and it being like a gorgeous marriage – between not only the two, but also art song and opera and whatnot – how has that culminated in your National Sawdust program on Dec. 15? What inspired you to curate a program of vocal classics?
I actually asked by Jeremy Gill – who’s the partner, for this series, of Chris Grymes – to bring a program of 20th century rep. I went to my beginnings at Pomona College; there’s a reference to Pomona because Karl Kohn was the composition teacher, and on my senior recital I did songs of his. And he’s the one who introduced me to Stravinsky’s music.
You also have [Elliott] Carter on there, and Ruth Crawford Seeger….
Well, I thought of pieces that I know well. All of this is music I’ve done before, except for the Miriam Gideon selections, which are miniatures – the four songs are less than four minutes long – and the Druckman. And there’s a story behind the Druckman: I studied with Jan DeGaetani and I knew Jacob Druckman, and Jan knew him, and had premiered a lot of things of his. And I got this score, The Sound of Time, a voice and piano piece. A year after its premiere, in 1964, he orchestrated it, and so it was soprano and chamber orchestra, and that was the only version available. But I have the original piano/voice version, which was a Naumberg Foundation commission, and I think it only had the one performance in 1964, at Town Hall. I’m really excited to be doing it. It’s a fabulous piece, texts by Norman Mailer from a book of poetry that evidently wasn’t a big hit, but had some really interesting lines from his published book, Deaths for the Ladies (and other disasters).
I’m actually finding, in preparing this program, that doing pieces I’ve done before is a huge challenge, because I remember how I used to do them, when I’d kind of hear it that way, and my voice is not the same. It doesn’t sound the same, and it’s harder work to find the way to sing them now. Whereas the new pieces, I’m just doing it fresh and meeting the challenges. So it’s actually easier to work on the really difficult Druckman piece than it is to do the little “Pastorale” of Stravinsky—things that are deep-seated in me, but vocally, I’m a different age.
It’s very interesting to think about, because even I will sing pieces that I first sung 10 years ago, and not necessarily like knowing what I used to sound like then, but it’s amazing how muscle memory can just sew itself into your larynx when you come back to a piece. And having to work around that, as opposed to being able to have the advantage and the privilege of looking at something completely new and completely fresh. That’s kind of the beauty of new music, in the sense of there isn’t an integral recording tradition to associate with a lot of pieces. There isn’t necessarily a strict vocal style or idiom. And the individuality of that can be really, really great.
Yes, it’s very freeing to be doing something for the first time. I’ve always thought.