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The Autobiographics of Louise Talma’s Have You Heard? Do You Know?
IAWM 2015
Slide 1, title slide: silent
Slide 2: In my previous work, I suggest that American composer Louise Talma’s musical
works are highly autobiographical. To fully comprehend much of her music, it is
essential to understand Talma in the context of her life, the time in which she lived and
composed, and the societal implications of that time. Using Talma’s scores,
correspondence, and other documents, interviews with her colleagues and students,
historical documents and publications, and tools from traditional music analysis, feminist
and queer musicologies, and women’s autobiographical theory, my work seeks to locate
and examine Talma’s life and works in these contexts.
Slide 3: While traditional musical analysis and queer theory will be familiar to many of
you, the application of women’s autobiographical theory to the works of women
composers may need some explanation. While finding autobiographical materials in
music is hardly new, and is frequently studied in the works of Sibelius, Mahler, and
others, such studies have not always coalesced with the theories of autobiography—
particularly women’s autobiography—in other areas of the humanities. Nonetheless,
applying tenets of women’s autobiographical theory to the work of women composers
can result in illuminating interpretations and understandings of their works. Hélène
Cixous has famously written that “women must write themselves,” and this need not be
limited in any way to prose writing.1 Indeed, Mary Klages notes that “we must look for
women’s writing in places, and using instruments, not traditionally associated with
2
writing, because those traditions are defined by male authors.” As Jane Marcus has
written of composer and memoirist Ethel Smyth, “one may see that the writing of music,
putting down notes on a page to represent the sounds of instruments, is a very powerful
form of symbolic inscription. Smyth’s tremendous success at the game of écriture came
from her ability to re/sign the drive to create music into storytelling and to write [….] her
memoirs.”3 Talma’s music is her memoir.
Slide 4: For her short opera Have You Heard? Do You Know? (1976), Talma could not
find an existing scenario she liked and wrote her own libretto, itself comment-worthy.
She wrote, “I am, of course, intensely aware of what a risky thing it is to dare to do the
text as well as the music since words are not my métier (though in a sense they are, as in
my previous vocal works I've always chosen them, beyond the basic requirement of
meaning, for their sonorities and rhythms), but there is, as you know, considerable
precedent for it. [….] Finally, I say, if Dame Ethel Smyth could do it, why not I?”4 Citing
Smyth, a lesbian composer, Talma connects herself with what Elizabeth Wood calls
“Sapphonics,” or the aural “landscape of lesbian operatic life and listening.”5 Awareness
1
2
3
4
5
Hélène Cixous, “The Laugh of the Medusa,” trans. Keith Cohen and Paula Cohen, Signs 1, no. 4
(Summer 1976): 886.
Mary Klages, “Helene Cixous: ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’,” Helene Cixous: “The Laugh of the
Medusa”, 1997, http://www.colorado.edu/English/courses/ENGL2012Klages/cixous.html.
Jane Marcus, “The Private Selves of Public Women,” in Shari (ed.) Benstock, The Private Self: Theory
and Practice of Women’s Autobiographical Writings (The University of North Carolina Press, 1988),
125.
Louise Talma to Thornton Wilder, April 7, 1974, Thornton Wilder Collection, Beinecke Rare Book and
Manuscript Library, Yale University.
Elizabeth Wood, “Sapphonics,” in Philip Brett, ed., Queering the Pitch: the New Gay and Lesbian
Musicology (New York: Routledge, 1994), 39.
of this connection is a crucial one in interpreting both Have You Heard? Do You Know?
and Talma’s earlier grand opera The Alcestiad.
Slide 5: Talma’s grand opera The Alcestiad had been a success in Germany, and upon
returning to the United States, she was eager to write more works for the stage. In 1962,
the Hunter Opera Workshop asked Talma for a short work appropriate for advanced
students.6
Slide 6: The three thirty-ish characters of Have You Heard are Fred, a tenor, described in
the libretto as “a young businessman;” his wife, Della, a mezzo-soprano; and their single
neighbor, Mildred, a soprano. The action all takes place in Fred and Della’s house,
located “in Queens or Brooklyn Heights.” The plot takes place during a single day. While
Fred reads off the latest changes in the market from The Wall Street Journal and Della
comments on changing fashions found in Vogue over breakfast, Mildred comes in and
regales Fred and Della with news of more changes: the ice cap is melting, Venice is
sinking into the sea, in Southern California there is the biggest blizzard ever. Mildred
sings that “they’ve exploded the biggest bomb yet.”7 When it goes off again, she
continues, just run away. But Della says there won’t be anywhere to run away to, and that
is the crux of the opera. The three go their separate ways, and during the day think about
their own utopias, the places to which they would run to hide from the world and escape
its terrors. At the end of the day, they regroup and fantasize about their perfect retreat
from the world.
6
7
Louise Talma to Thornton Wilder, September 28, 1962, Thornton Wilder Collection, Beinecke Rare
Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.
Louise Talma, Have You Heard? Do You Know? Louise Talma Collection, Library of Congress.
Slide 7: It should be no surprise that the three characters of the opera and their viewpoints
are all autobiographical representations of Talma herself. Fred, the young businessman is,
like Talma, responsible, focused on work and finance, and absorbed by an upcoming
business venture. After a long day at work, he longs for a place where he can fish and sail
and hike, where the food is more interesting that Della’s cooking, and where he feels his
actions can make a difference. Fred is burnt out by bureaucracy and feeling
inconsequential, just as Talma was while she was teaching at Hunter College.
Conservative and practical Della, who avoids new fashions for the fear that they will
soon change, is unhappy about the rising cost of steak, and is dismayed by the way the
general “mess” of the world has led her friends into immoral and reckless habits and their
children into delinquency, likewise seeks a place in nature that is quiet, with just the
sounds of an idyllic burbling brook and songbirds to accompany her day. She is Talma’s
views on society personified, and together she and Fred constitute Talma’s desire for
solitude and lack of obligation to anyone except to herself; they are her need for places
like MacDowell and Yaddo and her drive to compose and be concerned with nothing else.
They represent good citizenship: they are proper capitalists, making and saving money
for their futures, dutiful to one another and their other responsibilities, pleasant to their
neighbors; they wear the facades that Talma herself dutifully wore for most of her career
when she was not in semi-seclusion at MacDowell or other colonies.
Mildred, who stands in for Talma’s intellectual curiosity and interest in politics
and world events, is a single woman who seems to need to be the center of attention, and
creates or uses drama to get it. When Mildred returns in the evening with more news,
Fred and Della prevent her from telling them what it is, but encourage her to join them on
a fantastic voyage to all of what they consider the quiet and perfect places for a hideaway,
starting with the moon. Between the three of them, they journey imaginatively through
outer space before adding historically and culturally rich places on earth and in
mythology to their list: Sark, the Canaries, the Gardens of the Hesperides, the Elysian
Fields, Atlantis, Petra, Plutarch’s grotto. They sing farewells to the noisy world around
them, but make no motions to leave, and the opera ends in this state of reverie.
Slide 8: Talma intended the tone of the opera to be humorous, but this is rarely
communicated effectively in the work.8 Instead, it functions as a catalogue of Talma’s
own fears about the environment and world peace, as well as a documenting her
continued desire to be at a remove from the rest of the world. The repeated statements
about places in which nature and wildlife is close but safe are direct references to
MacDowell and Yaddo. Talma once described her own utopia at MacDowell: “a place to
work absolutely undisturbed, and with no obligations.”
Slide 9: Talma began composing the opera by “finding”—as she put it—the right pitches
to fit several key lines: “Perhaps we should all go away,” “I want a quiet place far away
near a flowing brook and a wood,” and “We can settle for a while on an island out in
space.” She then used those pitches as the beginnings of two twelve-tone rows: {F# G D
A C F B-flat E C# D# G# B} and {G D E F# C# D# C B A B-flat F A-flat}. All of the
text Talma set prior to selecting the full pitch class sets indicate the importance of major
seconds and perfect fifths in the work, as do the rows themselves. She sets the thesis of
8
Louise Talma. “Louise Talma: A Conversation with Bruce Duffie,” interview by Bruce Duffie, March
1, 1986, http://www.bruceduffie.com/talma.html. Accessed July 30, 2013.
the opera, “Perhaps we should all go away” with the limited pitch class set {C C# D E F#
G}, emphasizing the C#-D, E-F#, and D-G relationships.
Slide 10: Della and Fred express their initial tiredness and desire to get away with the
same melodic line, an octave apart. Della wants to “get away” before her youth is gone,
but turns to prosaically making her grocery list. Fred, when he arrives home while she is
out, continues his reverie, asking what the point of work is unless you can get away from
it. This passage, which sets of the text in so that it mimics natural speech patterns,
functions as a precursor to the trio in which all three singers fantasize about earthly and
galactic places of rest.
Slide 11: The melodic minor seconds in the vocal line in measures 580-585 provide a
sense of longing and weariness as Fred begins his statement of wishing. Consonant
accompaniment in measures 580-582 initially suggests that his wish will be fulfilled and
that harmonic peace will signify the realized desires of the trio. However, with the
inclusion of harmonic major seconds in measure 584, Fred’s wishing is undermined by
incomplete ninth chords in the strings and trumpet, specifically the pitch class set {A
B# E# G# }, which suggests futility of his daydreaming. As Fred wishes again and then
trails off, the pitch class moves
Slide 12: to {C E-flat F G-flat}, another incomplete extended tonality. With the pickup to
measure 586, Fred attempts to fill in the missing pitch with his A and A-flat, but now
while the harmony is more established, the syncopated rhythms in the winds are
positioned to contrast against his more straightforward line. Fred’s line adapts to match
them in measure 587, but once again the accompaniment shifts away from his vision.
Brief consonances, such as the D in the bassoon and G in Fred’s line slip away quickly,
and for all Fred’s attempts to capture the rhythm of the instruments, he is never quite with
them. Only at measure 596, two measures before the climax of his line, does he appear to
come into synchronization with the flute and clarinet. However, their material consists of
his own initial oscillating minor seconds from the beginning of the passage: they have
come full circle, and he has not yet arrived. The descents of the flute and clarinet lines in
measures 589 and 599 confirm that the winds have already peaked, and the strings
rapidly follow, leaving Fred musically behind. This construction, in which Fred’s desires
are never quite in sync with the world around him, stands as a metaphor for his hopes of
escape.
Slide 13: When Mildred bursts into Fred and Della’s apartment in the evening with more
news, Della suggests that that all need to get away. Della’s first suggestion is Jamaica, but
Fred chimes in with “Jupiter, or the moon,” further confirming his secret belief—or
knowledge—that they can’t really escape from modern life. Their science-fiction
fantasizing goes mostly unmarked by the instruments except for off-beat minor sevenths
in the strings that are set against vocal pitches a half-step away from the higher string
pitches, creating simultaneous minor and major sevenths. In the absence of other pitches,
these intervals mark only the cognitive dissonance Talma presents between Fred and
Della’s more realistic goals discussed previously and this conversation. Fred leads this
part of the trio; Della follows four or five beats later with the same melodic material an
octave above Fred’s, and Mildred follows Della three or four beats after she begins to
sing. While Fred’s and Della’s lines end with descending interval, Mildred’s rise, as if she
is asking a question rather than making a statement, indicating the unease she feels with
this unexpected fantasizing.
Slide 14: Talma then gives Delia a long solo in which she proposes that there are equally
restful places on earth. Some are located in the past, are mythological, or are otherwise
inaccessible, but others are real. Della’s imagining of these is accompanied by a repeated,
chromatic, undulating line in the clarinet that is later picked up by the flute and which
signifies the exoticism of these places to the characters. Talma makes sure, however, that
the characters’ vocal lines acknowledge the quality of the suggestions as they take a turn
for the unattainable: they become increasingly chromatic, emphasizing the minor second.
The stress placed on this interval, with its connotations of regret and sorrow in Talma’s
music, suggests that the characters are resigned to not escaping, that they recognize the
impossibility of escape.
Slide 15: As the fantasy progresses, Talma frequently sets he two women’s voices in
parallel or similar motion together, in contrast to Fred, whose line is in contrary motion to
theirs in an almost textbook-like manner. In a section dreaming about Petrarch’s grotto,
Talma makes a very subtle reference to her own life, and perhaps her relationship with
her married lover Eth Chapman by closely connecting the work’s single woman and
married woman, and leaving out the married husband. Despite rhythmic unity among all
three members of the trio, Talma introduces discord between Della and Fred by having
them sing at traditionally dissonant intervals including major seconds and tritones.
Mildred, too, is set in harmonic opposition to Fred, with their lines most often set an
octave and a semitone apart. Mildred and Della, in contrast, are set closely and in
consonance throughout the passage, complementing one another. Example 7-2: Trio,
mm. 922- 933
Slide 16: Fred is marked as an outsider to their relationship and vision of utopia in
Petrarch’s grotto, and it is likely no coincidence that he is signified so in a passage that
refers to the original narrator’s love for a woman, Laura. At measure 934, the connection
between the women is strengthened by Talma’s use of imitation. For the first two lines of
text quoted from Petrarch, all three singers began together and were in rhythmic unison.
In her setting of the third line, Talma has Mildred it alone and with Della imitating her at
the octave a measure later. Fred enters with Della but at a tritone’s distance. That Della
imitates Mildred and is in harmonic dissonance with Fred suggests Della’s willingness to
follow and find agreement or even pleasure with the other woman, while Fred’s
dissonance with both women continues to signify his status as an unwanted other. The
section ends with Fred sustaining an A-flat against Della’s D and Mildred’s G. Thornton
Wilder suggested to Talma that the use of a trio like this one would raise expectations of
romance, and Talma appears to have listened—and responded in a way perfectly in
keeping with her earlier musical expressions of same-sex attraction and love.9
The configuration and texture of the Petrarch section is repeated once more in the opera,
when Della mentions “Cythera, the purple isle, the birthplace of Venus.” Once again,
Mildred and Della sing in consonance while Fred has a dissonant line in relation to both
women. The strings are muted and sustained, and the text speaks of places that are
9
Thornton Wilder to Louise Talma, May 12, 1974, Louise Talma Collection, Library of Congress.
refuges from sound and noise, places that are silent, places where the soul can recover
from daily life.10
Slide 17: The final section of Have You Heard is more than a hundred measures of the
characters saying good-bye in various ways. Mildred and Della sing in counterpoint that
they’ll send “a postcard from the Moon;”11 all three sing in rhythmic unison that they’ll
be searching for a long time to find the perfect place; and they sing individually about
leaving. But the instrumental music that surrounds their lines is static, if quickly paced:
running sixteenths in the strings oscillate between two pitches a whole tone apart,
creating a pattern that is never completed. Sharp, short eighths in the winds also move
very little pitch-wise, echoing the excitement of the characters’ longed-for departures, but
representing the reality that they never actually go anywhere. At measure 1032, Della and
Fred sing in consonance for the first time since the trio’s reverie began, but this
agreement is brief: five measures later, all three voices are in dissonance with one
another. Mildred and Della have brief moments of unisons and consonances thereafter,
but at the very end, Talma asks Mildred and Fred to sing the same pitch, an octave apart.
This is in harmonic consonance with Della’s pitch, and the unity here hints at the
possibility that Della considers both as her partners—in imaginary travel, in real life, in
romance. That this final, sustained dyad is approached by consonances between Mildred
and Della and a dissonance with both women’s voices from Fred perhaps represents the
more sympathetic relationship between the women than that in the marriage.
10
11
Talma, Have You Heard? Do You Know?, 215.
Ibid., 222.
Slide 19 (blank): Musically speaking, over the course of the day, Mildred has
transformed from pleasant if anxious neighbor to potential love interest for Della. Della
has realized her disconnect from her husband, and Fred, whose life was all-too
predictable, has become destabilized. While no one has traveled anywhere, or found their
ideal place of quiet, their worlds have changed significantly. Have You Heard mirrors
Talma’s own desires for quiet and solitude, the surprise of falling in love with a
(heterosexually married) friend, and her ultimate realization that true escape from the
everyday world is impossible.
Ultimately, while Talma created a scenario that Wilder criticized as anti-Aristotelian and
unbalanced, insisting, “We need another man in there,”12 Talma’s representation of the
reality of a single woman in New York rang true for her. Have You Heard? Do You
Know? is a work rich with Talma’s self, a work that can be read in many ways, all of
them equally true for the composer as an autobiographer.
Slide 20: contact info
12 Thornton Wilder to Louise Talma, May 12, 1974, Louise Talma Collection, Library of Congress.