Making I Hear America Singing
1. America Singing What?
Imagine five parallel lines running from the first song ever sung (bleated, maybe, by an infant begging for milk?) to Kendrick Lamar’s February 2025 performance of The Revolution Will Be Televised at the Superbowl. One line consists of folk tunes; the second worship tunes; the third protest songs; the fourth, commercial tunes; and the fifth, art song. Together, the braid they form is America’s Whitmanesque communal song.
Aaron Copland recontextualized American cowboy songs in his gently modernist ballet scores Rodeo (1942) and Appalachian Spring (1944). By 1960, commercial film composers like Elmer Bernstein, in his score for the great remake of Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai (1954), The Magnificent Seven (1960) further mainstreamed what by then was being identified as an “American sound.” Between 1959 and 1973 there were nearly a hundred US Western series on television; many of which began with theme songs vaguely reminiscent of Copland. In 1963 the Bernstein theme was recontextualized as the jingle for “Cowboy Killer” Marlboro cigarettes; by 1992, Copland’s Rodeo was being licensed by his publisher Boosey and Hawkes to sell beef.
What genius it was to take the Renaissance song L’homme armé (a tune about the “armed man” from around 1460-ish) and recontextualize it as the spoonful of sugar cantus firmus for a Mass. The Catholic Mass is considered by some to be the first and greatest opera, combining as it does the “greatest story ever told” with an easy to act, highly flexible performance structure. (I’ve attended Masses in Venice that lasted fifteen minutes, and ones in Rome that lasted over two hours. A familiar tune rattling around in the music does help to keep the congregation tuned in.) Over forty separate compositions entitled Missa L’homme armé survive from the Renaissance, all built on reworking the same tune. The tune isn’t played out, either. Peter Maxwell Davies treated it in 1968; and Marc-André Hamelin made it into a Toccata when he fulfilled his Van Cliburn Competition required piece commission in 2017, among numerous other examples.
By focusing on John and Alan Lomax, who preserved thousands of early 20th century American folk songs over the course of their careers, and are partly owed the wider exposure gained by Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, Lead Belly, and Robert Johnson, and many others, I admit that I am, out of ignorance, doing a disservice to the extraordinary breadth of Native American songs that exist, including holehole bushi, Mexican-American, immigrant musics, and on and on. I think of the “Americana” to which I’ve been exposed as an interested non-musicologist. Most people have easy access to the Lomax “Southern Journey” recordings through mainstream features like the Coen brothers’ film O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000) Performing these songs in their “original” forms to conserve them, as well as “covering” (reinterpreting and recontextualizing them) enables them to continue to be agents of protest and inspirers of change, despite the legitimate concern that, in some ways, they encourage the view that “the South stole Americana.” Song as promoter of multiculturalism can be a counterbalance to commercial recontextualization.
Between 1858 and into the late 1950s “78 rpm” shellac records held 3 recorded minutes. 180 seconds to land, to deliver a verse, a chorus, a hook, a lyric, and a dream. Despite the introduction of the 45 in 1949 by RCA, that technical / commercial limitation fundamentally shaped (with obvious exceptions like American Pie, Bohemian Rhapsody, Light My Fire and long form album rock from the 70s on) nearly all the songs released by Elvis, the Stones, the Beatles, Motown, and R&B. How miraculous the accomplishment of George Gershwin’s Summertime, from Porgy and Bess, which has been recorded nearly 68,000 times. Think of that … Or God Only Knows by the Beach Boys, Madan by Salif Keita, or Tito Puente’s Oye Cómo Va, and on and on. Counterpointing the imperative that commercial song instantaneously provoke the Proust Effect is the compact genius of its formal construction.
While commercial interests shaped intent, duration, and (to some extent) the audience for commercial songwriters, others continued to develop longer forms, songs that extended the roots of show tunes, singspiel, mélodie, lied, chanson, many using the incredibly durable “simple verse-chorus” form that goes back to the mid 19th century, and the “AABA (verse)” Tin Pan Alley form that emerged at the turn of the 20th. These songs, composed to thrive in an earlier commercial music environment, tend to last longer, unfold more luxuriously, and cross back and forth between the concert hall and music theater traditions.
Art Song has long thrived in the recital hall, with composers recontextualizing pre-existing words (poetic and non) by adding music inspired by them that cooperated (or didn’t) with the poetry’s literary form. Art songs benefit from the expectation of directness and concision that commercial songs have taught listeners to expect. With the musical form (usually) dictated by the literary form, the composer is free, if they want, to radically change the text’s context. The composer can do this by ignoring or disagreeing with some or all the lyric’s literary structure, imagery, or “meaning,” setting for “understandability” rather than how the words scan on the page, and so forth.
Robbie himself explains what the score of I Hear America Singing is doing: “I’m taking songs from American history, recontextualizing them, and shining a contemporary light on them to show that it is love — love and loss, really — that binds us together as a nation. The love that drives us to help one another; helps us to transcend self-interest. Everything in the public domain. Old wine. New bottles. New lyrics. Old songs. Out of copyright! We need a revolution of the heart.” He is singing for his life. We know that Robbie is referring to bringing into Whitman’s “harmonious community” the strands within himself; but we also know that we have been invited to consider and process how Robbie’s attempts to musically intertwine these strands reflect American musical history. As a line I cut from the script says, “If anyone can make consonance sound dissonant, it’s Robbie.”
2. The Craft to Conceal One’s Craft
Remember Richard Strauss’ stance: the more you know, the more you understand. His operas were (in a positive sense) quintessentially middlebrow; devoted to the high, but accessible to the many. They continue to serve as an avenue for enlightenment because they derive their continuing universal utility not from their plots but from the irresistible, lizard brain emotional eloquence of the music with which he contextualized them.
One doesn’t have to have seen the first two installments of the Bardo Trilogy to intuit that Singing’s breezy film editing and cozy documentary film and musical theater tropes are employed to disarm. Whereas we’re meant to be dazzled by the sophistication of Welles’ towering intellect in Orson, we’re invited from the outset of Singing to find Robbie and his jazz hands weltanschauung mildly cringeworthy.
The historical Orson Welles thought of himself first as a magician — as a professional liar, a trickster, a seeker of truth through lies. In Orson, as he comes to terms with his life, he runs the show: he shuffles through the beats of memory (or his heart) like playing cards, a magician looking for truth using his instruments of deception. The diners in 9/10: Love Before the Fall do not know until Charon extends his hand for payment that they have been in the bardo the whole time. In Singing, Robbie begins to sense that the documentarians firing questions at him are not what they appear to be: they treat the narrative that he offers in his answers to their questions the way that composers treat a text they are setting it to music.
Robbie is music, and he views his life as a song. He expresses himself by composing, singing, and conducting. He enters life by making music with his friends; and as he does so, he changes the way that he performs music as it reveals its (and by extension his) truth to him. For better or worse, whatever his professional attainment or the relative “seriousness” of his way of life, Robbie is a highly skilled, motivated professional artist who understands that, as Oscar Wilde said, “To reveal art and conceal the artist is art’s aim.” In other words, Robbie is an unreliable narrator recontextualizing his own experiences not to make himself feel (or look) better to anyone else but in hopes that it will help him reveal his truth to himself. It isn’t that Robbie hid the truth and forgot where he put it, to paraphrase Robert Bolt; it is that Robbie has never really had both hands on the truth and is running out of time to find it.
I Hear America Singing is the context in which Robbie’s story unfolds as he submits to the documentarians’ questions, goes through the motions of revising his earlier musical triumph, tries without success to mend his relationships with others, and, like Orson and his playing cards, recontextualizes the elements of his story as song, trying to make sense of what is happening to him and to remain relevant by understanding how American song sings to him. By the end, Roger just comes out and says it when he quips, “I call it, Robbie’s Guide to American Song — a Lecture Demonstration.” Stressing that there’s nothing particularly autobiographical about the character, I did present my own back catalogue as being Robbie’s by reaching into my own thirty- and forty-year-old misfires and juvenilia and recycling them as Robbie would his own, thereby giving him the sort of musical experiences that give older composers their gravitas.
Whereas each character had a different musical style in 9/10, each requiring a different method of vocal production, I gave Orson a highly allusive, smart, wildly eclectic stylistic range, and dug into the physical and timbral differences between a young, middle-aged, and old male singer; the singing style remaining consistently “fill a theater” operatic. Rose and Roger in Singing move from singing style to style, but always at Robbie’s lead, as though extensions of his imagination. Robbie’s music compulsively exploits the contemporary baritenor’s entire theatrical range, resulting in the single most virtuosic, tour de force male role in the Bardo Trilogy, requiring of Robert Frankenberry as flexible an intellectual, aesthetic, and physical technique as that required of Gilda Lyons’ Eury / Trina / Spirit Coro in 9/10.
3. Transitivity: Watching Orson Watching Charon Watch Robbie
The strings in Orson are (intentionally) crudely synthesized on the soundtrack and analogue on the stage. Throughout 9/10 the strings constantly shift in the percentage of the imperfect “real” string orchestra that I recorded beforehand and the “perfect” sound of synthesized strings. When the acoustic string quartet joins Robbie on the soundtrack of Singing, its fragility enhances both the intimacy and tenderness of the moment. The slight imperfections in pitch sound “real,” and “human.” When everything seen on the screen and heard on the soundtrack seems so effortlessly “real” that there is no longer any sleight of hand (or “magic,” if one prefers) in the artifice has the form not succumbed to the ultimate sacrifice of “reality” to the “realism” of classic film theory? Gone is Fellini’s “so fake it’s real,” replaced by the stance that nothing can be trusted, and hand of author signifies not “authenticity” but the inability of the artist to afford the technology to make the thing slicker in its execution.
If Arthur Schnitzler’s La Ronde figures in the logic of Orson, then the logic of Wim Wenders’ angels’ figures in 9/10’s, and the logic of Christopher Guest’s “fake documentaries” figure in Singing. Jacaré with his bass becomes Charon with his fiddle, who, in turn, becomes Robbie’s documentary interrogators. The crack of thunder in Orson marking his myocardial infarction becomes the crack of thunder in 9/10 when Tony throws Bibi’s chair to the floor and the cluster heard when Robbie collapses. The Spectral voices in Orson become the Spirit Coro in 9/10, which become the little theater orchestra in Singing. The red tombstone empty theater seats of Orson become the 360-degree dining shots in 9/10which in turn become Robbie’s spinning empty theater seats.
The three solo arias in Orson (Alone, All Through, and Falstaff) become the four “I am / I want” arias in 9/10, which become the three “11 o’clock” songs in Singing. The applause / rain in Orson becomes the rain heard as the four diners transfigure in 9/10 and the applause heard by Robbie offstage. Beatrice Welles in Orson becomes Lulu in 9/10 and then the Stage Manager in 9/10. The ecstasy of Shakespeare in Orson becomes “being high” in 9/10 and “going up” in Singing. “Edit-edit-edit” becomes “Remember” becomes “Line-line-line.” The “beats” in Orson become “removes” in 9/10 and “acts” in Singing.
Orson and Cory are drunks; Tony is an addict; Roger is an alcoholic. Chopin’s Prelude Opus 28, Number 19 in E flat major figures in Orson as Ferry Me Across the Water figures in 9/10 and “Nessun Dorma” in Singing. The onstage orchestra in Orson becomes a chorus of Jangadeiros; the anime di Passaggio and female Spirit Coro in 9/10 becomes a menacing sound mass of hostile critical voices in Robbie’s mind. The inside of the Studebaker Theater is the interior of Welles’ mind is the Italian restaurant is the backstage of a black box theater is the bardo. Musicians in Orson become diners in 9/10 become backers in Singing. The legato filmic overlays in Orson give way to the contrapuntal split screens of 9/10 and then to the staccato documentary editing of Singing. Scene transitions in Orson are marked by fourth wall breaking intertitles; 9/10’s transitions coincide with removes; Singing’s come when Robbie sleeps.
For the record: in Orson, three black and white stationary cameras and a smattering of hand-held shots with some framings are intercut with 52 wildly eclectic and colorful short films and single-color overlays; 9/10 used four stationary cameras at the points of the compass and one Steadicam rover; Singing was shot entirely with one Steadicam. Depth of field in Orson was achieved with massive use of foreground-medium-background overlays; 9/10’s tableaux were blocked; Singing’s were mainly achieved through focus pulls. Brechtian acting in Orson became a dialogue between Meisner and Stanislavskian techniques in 9/10, which gave way to a dialogue between scripted and improvised dialogue paired with “stage” versus “film” acting.
The non-linear surrealism of Orson gives way to the magical realism of 9/10, which in turn surrenders to the docufiction of Singing. Begin again.
4. “Robbie’s Guide to American Song” – a Lecture Demonstration
We meet Robbie alone, asleep at the piano. He hears a roiling sound mass of voices in his head consisting of fragments of bad reviews, misgivings, remembered slights, doubts. A three note Robbie leitmotif sounds in the piano; it is an inversion of the Orson motif and a variant of the Remember motif from 9/10. It returns at key moments for the rest of the film and, in this case, cuts off the voices. His first waking thought is of the Recordist wiring him for sound.
Although I will gloss lightly over this after describing this scene, this obsessively allusive and layered narrative style continues along these lines for the rest of the film. Roger and Rose are first introduced backstage in a blue passageway Robbie will enter himself for the last time at the end, and which carries forward the passaggio metaphor from 9/10 as an entranceway to the bardo. When Roger first enters, we hear Robbie running different strings of eight notes together onstage like a child playing with a Rubik’s cube. He is “looking for a way in” as he sings the word “recontextualization” to the eight notes, then sings the same word to the tune of I’m a Yankee Doodle Dandy, George M. Cohan’s song for the eponymous 1942 musical/drama. He then sings the word to the pitches of an octatonic scale, which reminds of his teacher, Stephen Sondheim’s mentor, Milton Babbit, whose early career involved a stint trying his hand unsuccessfully at writing pop songs. From the other direction, Roger hears Rose singing Robbie’s setting of Gertrude Stein’s short poem, “I am Rose” as she approaches the theater. The art song will return later and represents the first time that I inject a bit of my own musical DNA into the story for the sake of verisimilitude, since the setting is one that I composed in 1983 at the behest of my mentor, Ned Rorem, who himself set it to music in 1955. Robbie’s musical leitmotif sounds as Rose opens the backstage door and sees Roger.
Offstage, the evolution of the Robbie motif continues until it becomes the introductory piano chords to the score’s first song, a hymn called I Hear America Singing, which Robbie has already begun performing before his friends arrive. Once they join him, the tune quotes the first six bars of Sondheim’s The Hills of Tomorrow, a song ultimately cut from Merrily We Roll Along (1981), which, like Follies (1971), are the obvious touchstones for a composer like Robbie. The lyric consists of an ironic recontextualization of words from Walt Whitman’s poem in the 1860 edition of Leaves of Grass. From this point on I will only touch on the songs, not the musical underscoring and soundtrack score.
Roger and Rose in place, Robbie launches immediately into his arrangement of The Vacant Chair (1861), a Civil War strophic ballad by composer George F. Root, with text by Henry S. Washburn. On one level, Robbie is telling them he’s dead: on another he’s repurposing it as a call to memory.
Remember How it Was continues the fallibility of memory trope by repurposing a duet from a musical called Together (1976) I wrote under the influence of Burt Bacharach’s structural reimagining of Tin Pan Alley song forms in Promises, Promises (1964). When Robbie plays the song’s introduction, an imaginary string quartet joins him. Like the Shibuya-kei Bibi sings in 9/10, the M.O.R. the music tells us who they are — or at least who Robbie sees them to be.
Robbie experiences a misfire when he repurposes the anthem Eternal Father, Strong to Save (1860) — also known as the Navy Hymn. Rose flamboyantly rips the music from the rack, saying “I hate this; but I love you.” Having spent three years weaving the anthem into my Naval service family opera Amelia (2010), I’m commenting here on the inherent danger of overstepping when one recontextualizes sacred music.
Knowing that the lyrics cannot compete with the music, Robbie doesn’t bother to craft anything better than “dummy” words (which nonetheless move the story forward) to Stripes and Stars when he repurposes John Philip Sousa’s march The Stars and Stripes Forever (1894) as a vaudeville patter song. He does it as a flex, demonstrating that he’s fully capable of pandering, but won’t.
Robbie alone hears the string quartet when he plays the introduction to the breakup song Our Love’s Absence. Here I repurpose the music to the art song Holy Thursday, from my song cycle Muldoon Songs (1992), making it a trio, crafting new lyrics, and expanding on its original musical basis — the two measure bridge in George Gershwin’s The Man I Love (1927) — which I repeat as an accompaniment pattern for the strophic verses of my song. The effect is like a painting of a line drawing of a photograph.
The transition utilizes a few electroacoustic collage techniques that develop the sound mass first heard at the start, but I will leave that discussion to someone else, as the process involved carries forward techniques already discussed in Orsonand 9/10, and this essay is about the different song types that Singing explores. When Robbie awakens, he crashes through a few bars of the Liszt B minor sonata (1853) (the most famous example of thematic transformation, and Robbie knows it), badly, before picking up the phone.
Two songs about dealing with alcoholics. We’ll Hold On, a folk/pop recontextualization along the lines of Joe Raposo’s Bein’ Green (1970) of the incredibly durable Appalachian folk ballad He’s Gone Away serves as a diegetic song in which Rose and Robbie discuss how Roger’s alcoholism “takes him away” from them. Experiencing, when sober, an inebriated person singing a drinking song is an intensely fraught experience. Rye Whisky, first recorded and released by Fiddlin' John Carson in 1926, is sung by Roger as he enters the bardo — an apt metaphor for being high.
For the medley song Rebel / Youth, Roger has brought with him a scena in rondo form in which lyrics (I’m a Good O’ Rebel) attributed to former Confederate major James Innes Randolph overlaid on a folk tune derived from the Northern minstrel troupe stage song Joe Bowers (1850s) are alternated with music and with lyrics and drawn from my story song The Picture Graved Into My Heart from the civil war art song cycle Dear Youth (1991), in which I set a letter of Hannah Ropes written on December 27, 1862 describing a dying soldier.
The Let Us Song is a novelty song, the first of a quick “songfest” of archetypical short song-types. Let Us’ gimme, a repeated canonic fragment of the words “let us,” is silly, and leads directly into a parody song setting of William Blake’s poem The Sick Rose (1794) sung by Roger while chewing scenery; Rose responds with the comic song setting of Gertrude Stein’s I am Rose heard at the beginning of the film. The suite ends with Robbie sending up Flanders and Swan (a British comedy duo who wrote over a hundred songs together) with O, When I Was in Love with You, in which he gives a Victorian-era poem by A.E. Housman the parlor song treatment.
The love duet for Roger and Rose is carried diegetically by a treatment of When I Was Single, adapted from two versions of the Scottish Highlands children’s song recorded by Lomax in 1949 (Lomax, pp. 154-158).
Little Snug Apartment begins by swinging in the 1930s radio style of the Mills Brothers (by way of Leonard Bernstein’s setting of e.e. cummings in Songfest (1977) — as a pop-gospel simple verse-chorus vocal trio treatment (with new lyrics) of the folk song I’m a Stern Old Bachelor (Lomax, pp. 354-355), recorded by Lomax in 1949. The dramatic transit of the song is in the way that Robbie gradually transforms the meaning of “bachelor” to “homosexual” and the song into a gay pride anthem.
The score climaxes with a suite of three 11 o’clock songs, each one an “I am” song: First, Roger sings To Stop Time, a wrenching, naked acapella confessional song about his alcoholism. Second, Rose sings (And Then) I Let Him Go as a lullaby, an adaptation of Liza Jane, an Appalachian fiddle tune recorded by Lomax in 1937 (pp. 284-285). Finally, Robbie sings I Believe in Song, a “Great American Songbook”-style song which, in the chorus, along with the string quartet in his mind, he uses the same descending chord progression as the Gershwin brothers’ 1924 popular standard The Man I Love from Lady Be Good (1924), adding his own Jerome Kern-style bridge and verse.
The transition that follows, which continues the development of the earlier electroacoustic soundscape, interweaves the music of You Don’t Fall Up, You Fall Down, which served as the final song of the original staged version of Robbie’s show but which he has cut in favor of a new song for Rose with the sound mass of snarling voices. When he awakens, he clears the air by playing and singing the released of the aria Nessun Dorma from Giacomo Puccini’s opera Turandot, singing, as Rose enters, “recontextualization” instead of “vincerò.”
At which point, the string quartet now audible to Rose as well as Robbie, they launch together into a finale, a “new song,” I Never Wanted Anyone Before, which is clearly a knockout, and demonstrates to them both that Robbie is back in the game. On a personal note, the song is completely me, and, as a nod to the DNA of the project, based on a song that I wrote in 1979 for the musical Together back in Wisconsin and revised for Robbie to have composed at the end of the film. I wanted that for him.
After their brief recapitulation of a few bars of I Hear America Singing Robbie looks up affectionately at them and says, “Do you see what we did here?” before walking offstage into the blue hallway in which we first met Rose and Roger to the strains of a little theater orchestra playing You Don’t Fall Up, You Fall Down. You don’t fall down, you go up?
5. Exiting and Entering
Robbie’s efforts to gather (or at least make sense of) the various strands within himself (and, by extension, of American song) culminate in him poignantly asking his friends, “see what we did here?” and they not having an answer. Shall it have been a measure of Aaron Copland’s impact on American culture that his music was licensed to sell beef, that Elmer Bernstein’s was repurposed to sell cigarettes, or that Blind Willie Johnson’s Dark Was the Night” was chosen (and by whom?) for inclusion on Voyager’s “infinite playlist?” Off all the songs go into space, engraved on not a 10-inch shellac 78, or a 7-inch vinyl 45, but a 12-inch, gold-plated copper record, where they will (or will not) undergo the ultimate recontextualization.
After Robbie and his friends have finished, there’s a smattering of applause, and Robbie is seen pausing backstage for a beat to listen to it. As he himself observed, “the thing is, you put the work out there, you put everything you’ve got into it and then it lands and then — poof — it’s gone.” It would be comforting to imagine that, during the credits as we watch him slowly walk away from the camera and into the Great Whatever, Robbie is thinking about the fact that the majesty of putting those songs on the Voyage spacecrafts is that they’ll never have to land, and, if they do, we’ll be long gone. As far as we are concerned, they will forever be “chanceful” things thrown out into the universe for whomever, whatever will hear them.
Robbie turns rounds the corner and disappears who knows where because Orson begins with everyone arriving at the theater to rehearse. “Mary, Queen of the Scots,” I recall my composition teacher David Diamond telling me during a discussion of fugue forty years ago, “my end is my beginning.” Ouroboros. By now it must be obvious that one can look at the Bardo Trilogy as a fugue, with Orson Rehearsed serving as the head of the fugue subject, 9/10 the body, and I Hear America Singing the tail.