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My relationship with Elizabeth Bishop started rather abruptly. I must confess that I was not familiar with her or her poetry before Suzie LeBlanc, the great Canadian soprano, asked me to set some of these poems to music for a Bishop centennial event with Symphony Nova Scotia in February 2011. I accepted the invitation without checking out the poetry first but, as I read the poems Suzie sent me, I realised that they would be a challenge to set to music.
My philosophy about poetry turned in to song is that, if the setting obscures more of the structure and meaning of the poem than it elucidates, the poem is best left alone. The music ought to serve the poem, not obscure it or appropriate it in any way. At first, Bishop's complex and often non-periodic rhythms and occasionally inscrutable meanings show a brilliant intellect at work that needs no assistance from a composer. At other times, however, her disciplined verse allows glimpses of lyrical abandon overtly or implicitly "in need of music".
Elizabeth Bishop loved music and refers to it often in her work: classical, jazz, popular - hers was an eclectic but uncompromising ear. My starting point in the setting of these four poems was a decision to visit musical worlds that Bishop might have experienced during her lifetime but only if these worlds could be argued for by the poetry itself. My quest was to discover the song inside each poem by searching for symmetries behind the convoluted asymmetries of each poem's surface: a rhythm implied by punctuation, a change of mode implied by a peculiar indentation in the text, a sequence of words which are reminiscent of lyrics of a popular music genre or a sound image in the text (like the "whistles from a factory" in Anaphora) which can convincingly be paired with a particular genre of music.
