Song of Myself (2019) for two choirs and speaker

Commissioned by Cappella Amsterdam

Performance: Cappella Amsterdam and VU Kamerkoor. Conductor: Krista Audere. Speaker: Maaike Martens. Muziekgebouw, Amsterdam, September 2019.

Text: Excerpts from Walt Whitman’s Song of Myself

Video Editing: Kristijonas Dirse.

The literary scholar Harold Bloom has said that for Americans Walt Whitman is their “imaginative father and mother, even if, like myself, you have never composed a line of verse.” 

That is, Whitman constitutes the consciousness of modern-day America. It is what one inevitably embodies in one’s language, constantly responds to, and what one is without necessarily knowing so. Whitman’s Song of Myself looks deep within the precursor of the so-called American Sublime: his own self. It is autobiographical in the sense that it reveals Whtiman’s own inner workings and states as well as the influence of poets of the past that he had consciously studied. It elevates the body and the mundane to transcendental heights and with great enthusiasm celebrates all that exists. But studying oneself is to study the other: 

what I assume you shall assume

For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you. 

The thought of reading the world through ones own self recurs repeatedly throughout the poem. 

In all people I see myself, none more and not one a barley-corn less,

And the good or bad I say of myself I say of them.

or

Clear and sweet is my soul, and clear and sweet is all that is not my soul.

The difference one finds between the narrator and the world comes from a degree of awareness and there is a hope about its temporary nature; in a way, the separation itself becomes the poem’s raison d’être:

I am the mate and companion of people, all just as immortal and fathomless as myself,

(They do not know how immortal, but I know.) 

or

I exist as I am, that is enough,

If no other in the world be aware I sit content,

And if each and all be aware I sit content.

Ultimately, time is the only barrier dividing consciousness of the narrator and that of the listener or reader:

Failing to fetch me at first, keep encouraged;

Missing me one place, search another;

I stop somewhere, waiting for you.

By getting to know what the narrator is, we really discover who we are and “I” simply becomes a placeholder for what philosophers and phenomenologist later would come to call “Being.” From various points in the poem we know that I am deathless, I am august, I am solid and sound;

My foothold is tenon’d and mortis’d in granite,

I laugh at what you call dissolution,

And I know the amplitude of time.

Through understanding the place of emergence of the American Sublime, I can put the immediacy and ugliness of political turmoil in perspective. I can be hopeful, for, the roots of idealism, democracy, and enthusiasm have not gone anywhere: they are at the heart of Whitman’s lasting influence and through their status as the “imaginative mother and father” they saturate the genome of the culture. I can understand my place of an European self within a boiling-pot of cultures through Whitman’s example that teaches one to recognize that which is shared. 

The piece for Capella Amsterdam, then, is firstly an attempt to bridge that gap — temporal rather than spatial — between me and the listener, between the heights of 19th century Romanticism and today, between Europe and America, and, more concretely, between the beginning and the end of the piece. I have chosen fragments of the rather lofty Song of Myself to explore the aspects of a rich and complex self: all of the excerpts describe the nature of the self in some capacity. And yet, as I have already demonstrated, the narration of the self reveals as much about the other. By constantly unfolding the self and its constituents one realizes that it is the larger culture and its time that the self inevitably reveals. My idea of this bridging is perhaps best described by what Gadamer in his Truth and Method would later call “fusion of horizons:” 

Every finite present has its limitations. We define the concept of “situation” by saying that it represents a standpoint that limits the possibility of vision. Hence essential part of the concept of situation is the concept of “horizon.” The horizon is the range of vision that includes everything that can be seen from a particular vantage point... A person who has no horizon is a man who does not see far enough and hence overvalues what is nearest to him. On the other hand, "to have an horizon" means not being limited to what is nearby, but to being able to see beyond it…  (Gadamer, Truth and Method)

The fusion of horizon is necessarily a ”formation of a new context of meaning that enables integration of what is otherwise unfamiliar, strange or anomalous. In this respect, all understanding involves a process of mediation and dialogue between what is familiar and what is alien in which neither remains unaffected. ” (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy; Gadamer)