The haunted palace for soprano, chamber ensemble, and electronics

Abstract

This work sets the poem “The Haunted Palace” by Edgar Allen Poe for soprano; a chamber ensemble consisting of three woodwinds, piano, and five strings; and fixed-media electronic playback. The six stanzas of the poem are each cast as an individual song, comprising together a sort of monodrama as the ballad progresses. Songs two through four are performed without a break, as are songs five and six. The poem was originally published in the magazine American Museum in 1839, then subsequently incorporated into the short story “The Fall of the House of Usher,” published the same year, as improvised verses sung by the eponymous Roderick Usher while he rhapsodizes on his guitar. The poem conjures an image of a once well-appointed and lavish mansion that has since decayed into ruin. This serves as an allegory for a mind lost to despair and disease, as various elements of the palace are compared to the hair, eyes, and mouth of a human head. The poem ends morosely, lamenting the loss of reason and its replacement by hollow laughter. Musically, the work interacts with and combines elements of two musical threads that wove through the twentieth century. The first of these is the that of melodramatic works for solo voice and chamber ensemble, as exemplified by Arnold Schoenberg’s foundational work Pierrot lunaire of 1912. The other is that of music for solo voice with electronics, first possible in the middle of the 20th century, and epitomized in such works as Philomel by Milton Babbitt, written in 1964. Babbitt’s simultaneous use of recorded and live voice in that work has particularly impacted the construction of this work.