Welcome to Resounding Verse, a podcast about poetry and song.

Poem number five from hyacinth by Duncan McFarlane:

you brought me some
 some time ago
 their stems cut short
 your arms around
 a bowl of clay
 the water still
 a prisoner
 your hands were cold
 I could not speak
 the iron door
 into the earth
 the narrow sky
 no more returns
 but afterthought
 for you to sleep
 and I to dance

This is the fifth and final poem in a song cycle with music by Cecilia Livingston, which we'll hear in a moment, and poetry by Duncan McFarlane. McFarlane is a poet, a librettist, and a scholar whose writing has appeared in various works of music—opera, chamber music, and art song—including another collaboration with Livingston, an opera called Terror and Erebus, which he created with her and which features six singers and a percussion quartet.

This cycle is called hyacinth, and it gives voice to an unlikely character: the Minotaur of Greek myth, the creature with the body of a man and the head of a bull.

In most tellings of the story, the Minotaur is a monster confined to the labyrinth beneath a palace in Knossos, the great Minoan royal complex on the island of Crete. In Greek mythology, the labyrinth is this enormous, winding structure designed by the craftsman Daedalus, and it's so intricate that once you enter it, you cannot escape from it. Inside this maze, the Minotaur lives in isolation.

According to the myth, the king of Crete, Minos, demands that Athens send young men and women as tribute into the labyrinth. These victims are released into the labyrinth, where the Minotaur hunts and devours them. Eventually, the Athenian hero Theseus enters the labyrinth, kills the Minotaur, and escapes with the help of Ariadne's famous thread.

In McFarlane's poem, and in the entire cycle, we are asked to hear the story from the perspective of the Minotaur, and to see him not simply as a beast, but as a lonely child imprisoned because of the way he looks, remembering fragments of a life that he lived above ground and, above all, remembering his mother. Across this cycle, the Minotaur sings to himself in the darkness of this labyrinth. In this particular poem, he recalls a small moment from the past: the day that his mother brought him flowers.

The poem starts with this simple memory:

you brought me some
 some time ago
 their stems cut short
 your arms around
 a bowl of clay
 the water still
 a prisoner

Those are the opening lines of the poem.

We see the mother descending into the labyrinth, carrying a small bowl with flowers floating in the water. Her arms encircle this clay vessel, as if protecting it during this journey downward. The flowers themselves are symbolic here.

Their stems are cut, already separated from the life that produced them, and they float in this bowl of water and are described as a prisoner. The word prisoner, of course, resonates with the Minotaur's own situation. The water in the bowl is trapped in its container, just as he is trapped underground, and the flower is cut off from its previous life, just as he is.

I love the ambiguity of the phrase “the water / still / a prisoner,” which happens across a line break, with “the water still” on one line and just “a prisoner” on the next line. The word still could function in two different ways here. It could be an adjective, suggesting that the water is quiet and motionless in the bowl: “the water still,” and then “a prisoner” as another thought.

Or it could be an adverb, meaning that the water continues to be a prisoner: “the water still a prisoner.” How we interpret it is dependent upon how we read it aloud, and McFarlane doesn't tell us the right way to read it, because the poem has absolutely no punctuation and no capitalization. Without commas or periods or capital letters to signal the boundaries of different thoughts, the lines flow into one another.

The poem becomes less like a set of discrete statements and more like a continuous stream of memory. After this opening description of the mother descending with a bowl of flowers, the memory becomes even more personal. The next lines are:

your hands were cold
 I could not speak

So the mother has come down into the labyrinth to visit her son, and she brings these flowers, perhaps as a small gesture of comfort, perhaps as an attempt to bring a trace of the outside world into his subterranean space. But when she arrives, he can't really communicate with her.

He can touch her—her hands are cold, we learn—but he can't talk to her. Even in this rare moment of closeness, there's a distance between mother and son. What McFarlane is describing here isn't just a mythological scene, but a very human one, a very common one, in fact: the awkward, wordless encounter between a parent and a child who are separated by circumstances that neither one of them can fully control.

Maybe you've experienced something like this, where you really want to say something to your mom or dad, but you can't for some reason, or you wish that they would express something to you, but they don't, and you're left only touching their hands, looking in their eyes, interpreting their feelings only through physical actions or wordless glances. That's one of the things I find especially moving about this poem.

It doesn't just humanize the Minotaur, but it takes this character's situation, which seems so otherworldly—a half-human, half-bull that's in a labyrinth, forced to chase down and kill young men and women. I mean, how fantastical is that? It takes this horrific, fantastical scene and makes it somehow relatable. It makes the Minotaur's experience seem like something almost familiar.

After this intimate, personal moment—mother and son holding hands, with nothing said but everything conveyed—the poem broadens its perspective, and we hear these lines:

the iron door
 into the earth
 the narrow sky

These three lines—“the iron door / into the earth / the narrow sky”—again with no punctuation and no capitalization, like three flashes of memory, encompass the Minotaur's entire world. Behind him lies the iron door of the labyrinth, descending into the earth.

Above him is the narrow sky, just a thin strip of the world above that he can only barely glimpse from his place of captivity. And then comes the poem's most haunting line:

no more returns

With these three words, we learn that this encounter with the mother, this remembered moment of tenderness between a mother and her son, was their last such moment.

She doesn't come again. Her presence can only be a memory for the Minotaur—an afterthought, as the next line says.

no more returns
 but afterthought

This is a curious word, afterthought. I tripped over it when I first read this poem, puzzling over its meaning.

An afterthought is usually something secondary, a detail that occurs later, something added almost incidentally after the main idea has already taken shape. It suggests something minor. Yet here, the memory that we have just witnessed—the mother bringing flowers into the labyrinth, holding hands with her son—is anything but minor.

For the Minotaur, it may in fact be one of the most important moments of his life. Maybe we're meant to think that this moment was in fact an afterthought for the mother, or that for those who witnessed it, it's an afterthought, something they've forgotten. But for the Minotaur, it's the very opposite of that: not an afterthought, but the primary thought, the main thought that he will continue to carry with him.

The final two lines of the poem recall a phrase that appears in several of the earlier poems in the cycle. And in this poem, they are:

for you to sleep
 and I to dance

These words first happen in the opening poem of the cycle, which seems to take place just as the Minotaur is about to enter the labyrinth for good. He says to his mother, “I have always, always, mother, held you dear and always held you in my thoughts.” And then we hear this:

Now you may sleep, but I must dance.

Here, the lines about sleeping and dancing feel almost protective. The Minotaur seems to be saying: I must go into the depths, mother, but you should try not to worry. You should know that I will be thinking of you.

But in this final poem, the lines about dancing have a darker undertone. Dancing becomes both literal and symbolic: the movements of ritual, the endless circling of the labyrinth, the mechanical repetition of a life confined to these underground spaces. Dance in this final poem is not a joyous thing, but a never-ending activity. And it's contrasted with the sleep of the mother.

for you to sleep
 and I to dance

The mother can rest, but the Minotaur cannot. He must continue this interminable cycle of destruction.

It's a harrowing ending, all the more so because it's so quiet. In the original myth, the Minotaur is eventually killed by the hero Theseus, as I mentioned before. Theseus enters the labyrinth and slays the creature before escaping.

But McFarlane's poem leaves that violent conclusion aside. Instead, the story dissolves into a series of repeated and disconnected images: a bowl of flowers, a mother's cold hands, a son's silence, a sliver of sky, a never-ending dance.

Poem number five from hyacinth by Duncan McFarlane:

you brought me some
 some time ago
 their stems cut short
 your arms around
 a bowl of clay
 the water still
 a prisoner
 your hands were cold
 I could not speak
 the iron door
 into the earth
 the narrow sky
 no more returns
 but afterthought
 for you to sleep
 and I to dance

And now, here is Cecilia Livingston's musical setting of this poem from her 2023 song cycle hyacinth.

The performers are soprano Laura Strickling and pianist Daniel Schlosberg. This recording comes from a live performance that they did in Chicago in December of 2023, but I just learned from Laura that they'll be releasing a commercial recording of the cycle this coming August on the Sono Luminus label.

[Music excerpt: Cecilia Livingston, hyacinth, no. 5]

Your hands were cold, like the iron door.
 Your hands were cold, like the iron door into the earth.
 The narrow sky, the narrow sky, the narrow sky.
 Your hands were cold, like the iron door.
 Your hands were cold, like the iron door into the earth.

Cecilia Livingston is a Canadian composer who specializes in music for voice. I first got to know her music when I heard two songs of hers on a 2024 CD by mezzo-soprano Emily D'Angelo, and the CD is called Freezing.

Both songs from that disc come from another cycle by Livingston called Lullabies, and here's a snippet of one of them, which has the same eerie beauty of the last song from hyacinth. This song is called “Snow.”

[Music excerpt]

White snow, still the white snow, whirls, whirls, softly down.
 Twig and bough and blade and thorn, all in an icy quiet forlorn.

These two songs—the last song of hyacinth and “Snow”—have a lot in common, I think, and they spotlight several things that I hear across many of Livingston's pieces. Those things are an arresting simplicity, spare materials, a penchant for minimalist repetition, a powerful sense of melody, with often achingly beautiful melodic lines, and what we might call a part-pop, part-classical sensibility.

There's something about her music that stands between popular song and art song, however we may define those terms, and I hear this in the free and flexible melodies of her songs and also in their grooves. And I use the word groove to describe things that don't necessarily move quickly—sometimes they do in her songs—but also can move very steadily and slowly, as we hear in these two songs.

The pop elements in the last song from hyacinth are evident right from the start in the quality of the melody, which Laura Strickling sings with the perfect amount of under-production. She is a classically trained singer who can blow the roof off any concert hall, and yet here she sings with a kind of intimacy and an inwardness that really suits this popular style.

The expression marking right above the tune says, “Easy, gentle, singer-songwriter style,” and then, “Take the rhythms off the page and make them casual.”

If you were to look at the notation of the melody, you'd see that it looks a little more like what we'd see in a transcribed pop-song melody than in an art-song melody. I notice this pop melodic style mainly in the syncopated notes, especially pitches that come in a moment before or after the beat.

And just to show you what I mean, I'm going to sing the melody and put everything on the beat, and then again play Laura Strickling's performance, and you'll see that things are freer, more casual.

[Vocal demonstration and music excerpt]

Another thing that gives the song a pop feel is its accompaniment, which, at least for the first part of the song, consists mainly of repeated piano chords. And you hear this most clearly in the middle section of the song, which uses only the line “the narrow sky” and repeats it three times. That section sounds like this.

[Music excerpt]

Yet the particular chords that Livingston chooses have a strongly classical bent. And I don't just mean that they sound vaguely like what we'd hear in a classical art song. I mean that they seem to draw upon a 17th-century idiom associated with tragedy and with dance: the so-called lament bass.

This musical figure involves a drooping bass line falling down from the first notes of a minor scale, sometimes with chromatic notes between the diatonic notes—chromatic notes between the white notes on the piano, in other words. The figure appears in laments throughout the world of folk and classical styles.

In a book called Listen to This, the amazing music critic Alex Ross, who writes for The New Yorker, describes these lament basses in a really vivid way that I cannot read without thinking about the myth that we've been discussing. And here's Alex Ross:

When a person cries, he or she generally makes a noise that slides downward and then leaps to an even higher pitch to begin the slide again. Not surprisingly, something similar happens in musical laments around the world. Those stepwise falling figures suggest not only the sounds that we emit when we are in distress, but also the sympathetic drooping of our faces and shoulders. In a broader sense, it implies a spiritual descent, even a voyage to the underworld.

Should it come as any surprise, then, that Livingston evokes a lament bass in her song about the Minotaur's descent into the underworld?

Listen again to the opening of the song and notice that the lowest notes in the piano slide downward by step. They go G, F, E-flat, and then they reverse course slightly and move up to F and then to F-sharp.

So the notes you heard are: la, la, la, la, la.

Despite the change in direction, this progression has all the telltale signs of a lament: a minor key, a bass pattern that starts on the main tonic chord and then descends from there and ends on the dominant chord of the key.

To prove this, all I need to do is play a 17th-century lament bass over the beginning of Livingston's song. And I've engaged in a little bit of magic here: I've taken a particular piece—and we'll find out what it is in a moment—and I've slowed it down so the tempo matches the song, and I've sped the song up slightly. But you'll see that what's happening in Livingston's song is an evocation of a tradition that stems back hundreds of years.

[Music demonstration]

But here's the thing: a lament bass isn't just a bass line; it's a repeated bass line associated with a repeated harmonic progression. This is what makes it what we call a chaconne in French, or chacona in Spanish.

Here's Alex Ross again, in a presentation based on a chapter from his book Listen to This, where he talks about chaconnes and lament basses. And he says this:

The chaconne was a sexually swirling dance that appeared in South America at the end of the 16th century and quickly spread to Europe, becoming popular both in the elite courts and in the general population.

And then he goes on to say this:

When, in the early 17th century, the great Italian composer Claudio Monteverdi wrote a Lamento della Ninfa, or Lament of the Nymph, he did something exceedingly clever. He combined the now-iconic figure of lament with the steady, hypnotically repeating bass line that was associated with the chaconne and other popular dances.

The lament bass that I slowed down and played over the hyacinth song is, in fact, an arrangement of Monteverdi's lament, which in its original form sounds like this.

[Music excerpt: Monteverdi, “Lamento della Ninfa”]

This is Jordi Savall conducting La Capella Reial de Catalunya.

Livingston's chaconne really does sound like a dance, especially as the song progresses. After the middle section—that section with steadily repeating chords that we heard a bit ago, set to the repeated line “the narrow sky”—we return to the lament-bass pattern, but it has more motion now.

[Music excerpt]

Now, of course, the song isn't done here, even though the vocal melody is done. We get another full page of music, a postlude just for the piano, above which is written, “With ease and groove.”

Piano postludes are no accidents. Composers choose to write them for a reason. It means something to have the voice stop and the piano continue on for 15 measures alone, as happens here. And what does this postlude mean? Well, on the face of it, it makes perfect sense that the postlude would dance with this groove.

But remember that I described the interminable dance at the end of this text as something not joyous but tragic, nothing less than a dance of death that the Minotaur is forced to repeat without end. In that light, the actual dance rhythms of the piano postlude come as something of a surprise, to me at least.

I half expected the song to end with, say, one more static repetition of the lament bass, to end as unceremoniously and simply as the poem itself.

Yet, as I have sat at the piano and played this postlude more times than I'd like to admit, I've come to see it as the key to the whole song. And I say key because the postlude opens so many doors to me, allows me to experience so many new things in the text, in the scene, in the mind of the Minotaur, and in the mind of his mother.

In a note at the top of the score, Livingston and McFarlane suggest that these songs, from the whole cycle, could be heard as many different kinds of memories.

And they write this:

We hear the Minotaur's internal voice as he sounds to himself.

But, they say, there are other interpretive layers. The Minotaur's songs might be remembered and sung by his mother, or reported to her by other women in his parents' palace who overheard this child singing to comfort himself, his melodies whispering up through the grates in the ceiling of this underground prison.

Reading this note and thinking about the true dance-like quality of the piano postlude, with its easy groove, makes me realize that this dance is so much more than I originally thought. Yes, it could be a kind of dance of death.

I think it is that: a metaphor for the endless ritual that the Minotaur must enact. But at the same time, it could be the Minotaur's memory, or his mother's memory, of a real dance—a dance that they both shared before he was locked in his underground prison—which they both sing to “comfort” themselves. That's a word from their note.

It could even be the memory of someone who overheard them singing. All of these interpretive layers are at play, which is one of the great wonders of the best art songs. You get to decide which interpretation means the most to you, and listen to the song again and again with different interpretations in mind.

With that in mind, here is the song one more time. And you get to choose whatever image you prefer as you listen to its haunting, dance-like postlude.

[Music excerpt: Cecilia Livingston, hyacinth, no. 5]

Special thanks to Cecilia Livingston for sharing a copy of the score with me, and also to Laura Strickling for giving me permission to use their video recording.

If you'd like to learn more about Cecilia Livingston's music, please go to cecilialivingston.com, and be on the lookout for a release of a professional recording of the cycle by Laura Strickling and Daniel Schlosberg, which is coming out in August of this year from Sono Luminus Records.

To listen and subscribe to the podcast, go to resoundingverse.com. And if you like what you’ve heard, I hope you’ll consider leaving a review on Apple Podcasts, or even sharing this episode with someone who you think will also enjoy this music.

Resounding Verse is produced by me, Steve Rodgers. Thank you for listening.