Grandiose Gestures: Text Declamation and the Songs of Louise Talma

Abstract

Louise Talma (1906–1996) was an American composer whose musical output included a large quantity of works for vocal forces. Most prolifically, she wrote art songs, completing around forty in her lifetime. This study examines the interaction between text and music in a selected number of her songs with text by Wallace Stevens. Specifically, it uncovers how declamation is used as a tool to express the character of her chosen text. The study accomplishes this by making adaptations to Harald Krebs’s Basic Rhythm of Declamation (BRD), a model for recomposition and comparison. Krebs’s model is originally for German-language Lieder from the Romantic era and metrically regular poetry, but this essay makes modifications such that the BRD can be applied to songs in English with loosely-metrical text. Talma’s songs frequently sacrifice the metrical integrity of the poems, not haphazardly, but to serve expressive ends and embody the meaning of the words. The same model could be applied further to songs in English with texts possessing elements of regularity by any number of composers, and pedagogically provides a new perspective in the theory classroom, as well as in composition and voice lessons.