Eve on "Provoke Me Not to Envy"

The Sonnet

(Eve on "Provoke Me Not")

An essay on Calbraith Hunter's madrigal, with a text by Lucy Tennant.

Eve of Brattleboro,
7-28-2525

My husband has encouraged me in this enterprise of telling the community of Hunter lovers about this favorite work in my usual personal style.

My husband labors in tandem as I write, working on the new documents that tell of Hunter's time as a music student in Boston. His copies are examined by the few who stop by from around our corner of the world, once and still called New England. We wonder what became of old England. It has been a very long time, so they say, since anyone came over in a boat. Well, the seas are treacherous. Anyone taking such a trip would need a very serious reason. My husband hates it when I drivel on, so let me be about my intended business. I do want to express myself and to speak plainly.

I will talk about Lucy's text. I feel a tremendous kinship for this text and for this woman. It is as if we are one and the same. I love a musician and could not have it any other way. It is also true that I came to my husband after a short marriage to another. Too much berry juice ruined it for me. It is not known whether Lucy had this difficulty with Laird, but Hunter hints at it when he speaks of the song (now lost) "Weed, Whites, and Wine." My former husband was a winemaker and he ended up face down in his product all too often.

Another area of sympathy I have is the notion, beautifully expressed in the text, of envy of one's partner's muse. For those who may not know, a muse is an ancient term for a goddess that inspired the creation of literature or art. Of course, we use the term more loosely, colloquially, to mean anyone, or even anything, that provides inspiration. Even though, in some respects I feel that I myself am my husband's muse (and he mine), I certainly can understand the envy (that covetous branch of jealousy) that arises when my husband outpaces me in quality and output.

Let me take you through the labyrinth of this poem:

"Provoke me not to envy of thy muse,
Her whom I love through thee (such voyeur I):
She beckons, and thou hasten'st to comply --
Unseen by thee, my breath around thee flows."

The first stanza tells of a person issuing a warning about provocation: it is allowed only by consent. As with all respected poetry, it suggests more than it tells of. If we assume something about the sexual tension implied by the relationship between the muse and the artist, we can assume that it exists in all of its complexities in the inner two lines. The writer is observing the relationship between muse and artist, as the artist is "beckoned" (seduced) and he (or she) responds ("complies.") It is a cause for envy, and it is blessed (consented to) by the arresting image of the unseen breath. We have assumed, before the discovery of the new documents, that the actual muse of Hunter at this time was Mara Monetti. It now seems that there was another woman who was doing the beckoning. The possibility is also there that this was a purely metaphorical muse, a strictly academic devotion to an art form. I tend to reject this interpretation, as where's the fun in it? We're humans, we get jealous, and envious, and we want to be seduced, to seduce, to respond and to be responded to.

If it is made quite clear in the narratives that Monetti was not beckoning, then we need to look at who might have been provoking all of this envy. My husband has come to understand that it may well, at the time this text was made, have been Heidi Walker. True, Heidi did not start school until the Fall. Hunter mentions this. But he also mentions all the letters, described as bulging with creativity. Was it she who beckoned? She seems to have been something of a prude, a proud virgin at age eighteen. I know my husband is on the fence about this, but intuition whispers in my ear. I can imagine a woman that, without the distraction of realities, could be quite compelling from a distance. Let me paint you a picture. She's petite, a winsome blonde maiden with the soul of an ancient mariner. Her ass is like two teardrops and her breasts match that in inversion. She's waspwaisted and tan. Her muscles are taught from dancing. She speaks in a melodious sing-song that enchants and caresses. Hunter has all of this locked away in memory. It has the quality of an image seen through mist. The letters, however, are very real. They arrive with astonishing frequency so that he cannot quite keep up. They are filled with drawings and poems and expressions of an exotic well-travelled philosophy. They do not mention  him directly, but he looks for signs of hope. Nothing she writes gives him reason to think that when they are together in Boston, they will not stick together like magnets. Nothing suggests that they will. It is a conundrum. As such, it has much power to tantalize and thus, inspire. Heidi is an excellent candidate for muse.

The question is, does Lucy know of her? Has she seen these letters?

"Know thou there is a muse who calls my soul,
Before whose burning eyes I hide my head.
I am not driven merely gently led
With rope quite long enough to choke this fool."

The writer now turns inward and expresses the danger of getting tangled up in this battle of the muses. It is always assumed that Lucy thinks of Cal as muse. She's observed the continual work and worry over work that goes on in his dank apartment. She is swept up in the romanticizing of the act of writing, the person of letters, and her ancient self is set free to be expressive. They are not fucking around, these long gone youth! But I think that this is false. "Balderdash!" (I've just learned this ancient jape.) I think that Lucy has a different muse in mind. Otherwise, why the worry over envy and jealousy? I'll admit, it's difficult to make this case. I believe in predestination. It's not rational, it's just is the way it is. We know that Lucy ended up with Van Dyke. They, as it turned out, stuck together like magnets after a performance on the organ. Van Dyke nailed it, the Bach, the Messaien, and then the babe. Cal was turning pages, remember, another mis-calculated 'acid experience' that "caused each page to catch fire as it was played." Which fool was choked?

So, yes, I think it's clear that she gave Cal every chance. He was looking elsewhere because of his misperception of the muse. She was a very lucky woman, with so many artists at hand  to choose from for muse-ability. She chose well, after a false start: she took up with Justin Van Dyke.

"Thy lady rules thee -- mine I'll not subdue;
Require it  not of me that I abase
My own small love before I win thy grace.
Inspire me now, that thou can'st let me go."

The writer brings the two muses together for a side by side comparison. She thinks Cal is ruled by his muse, but he has actually ceded control willingly. She, on the other hand, is willing to be ruled. For me, it is the sound of the archaic "can'st" that rivets my attention in the closing line of the stanza. Let me go? In the madrigal, of course, as we all know who join in these delicious parts, there is no resolution on the 'let me go' line: it traps the word in an unstable harmonic place (iv, m46), with the final heroic couplet bursting in with its sweet, sweet sentiment.

I am also moved by the central, encapsulated nature of the 'love' that appears in the stanza's inner lines. "Don't ask me to belittle my own affection before you'll bless me, give me something I can use, then set me free." That would be my paraphrase. Even a small love can be a problem. Love, as we all know, as opposed to lust or friendship, companionship, and respect, is characterized by momentary pleasures and eternal (or seemingly so) agonies. The poem has already touched on these in its mention of envy (the main theme). There is also voyeurism, as another muse is clandestinely observed. Then there is the hiding of the head, and the prospect of self destruction. It has always seemed to me that even this small love is very nearly unmanageable.

I would say that I love my husband as he sits beside me working. I love him all the more when he is absent. I am in love with him when we are close, making love, or, as most insist on saying now, fucking. The concept of love works best when it is mutually shared by consent. After a time, the aches subside, even when love is unrequited. After a time, two people making a life together settle down into familiar harmony and the turbulence of passion wanes. Our elders know this best of all. The subject of this poem is the management of the turbulence of passion, of jealousies and envies working in several directions. Lucy is envious of Cal's muse. The fact that it is not exclusively her is a provocation. She lashes out at the apparent stranglehold of his passion for another (which fool gets choked?) and demands to be freed without having to give up her small, troublesome love. (For Cal? For her husband, Laird? For Van Dyke?) The many magnets with their opposite poles exposed are floating at this moment of poetic outburst unconnected. The poet is seeking to keep it that way, perhaps.

The heroic couplet offers the preferred solution:

"Thus give me joy to breathe in as we part:
Within me be, as thy soul is my heart."

"Give me joy!" Shout it from the tallest place, from the tops of ruins that still stand! Find a mountain and climb it! "Breathe in!" Take in that sweet, pure breath of joy. It is bittersweet, for there will be a parting. Everyone must part, and that the time together has been long does not make it easier. When humans used to fly in fact and not just metaphorically, it sometimes happened that the moment of death for lovers was in the same instant. This is how I'd like to lose my husband: at the same moment I lose myself. It is not, as Browning says, so much a matter of fearing death, but fearing the pain of watching a lover die. If one's flying machine is heading earthward, who among us could summon up joy? She asks for joy to breathe in as they part. She knows it's a metaphysical stretch as a practical matter, so she seeks to internalize the connection between them and take the soul of that joy to heart. In fact, it may be even more intimate than that. The soul is tricky, the heart is sticky. There used to be a book called the "Joy of Sex."  Sex is a joyful act, if practiced properly and respectfully. When all the antique expressions are stripped away, the poem is saying, basically, "shut up and fuck me."

Poetry does not speak crudely most of the time. It has musical qualities that elevate it, no matter what its basic message. In this poem, there is an interesting and consistent sense of sonority in the rhymes. Each stanza's inner lines culminate in perfect rhymes. The outer lines, however, feature slant rhymes, or half rhymes. "Muse and flows, soul and fool, subdue and go..." What accent of the English language would make these perfect rhymes? It is a conscious, deliberate element of the structure. The subtleties such as this are masterful. No one can deny the lasting power of such poetry.

So that is my interpretation and thinking on the text. That it is not necessarily Hunter's take is proven by taking up the setting. The poem was set in a very short time, likely within a week of Hunter's receipt of it. The score dates from May of 1976, which is around the time that the fair copy of the "Swanee River Fugue" was being prepared. One can see in the writing of the madrigal the keen interest in the musica ficta of the Netherlanders. Virtually every decent rule in contrapuntal writing is not just violated but voided in turn. The result is a work that starts out and ends in the "heroic" key of E flat major (the key of two heroic sounding works of Beethoven, the "Eroica" Symphony number 3, and the "Emperor" Concerto number 5, not to mention Erroll Garner's "Misty," very much in the romantic vein), but stretches and then breaks the bounds of its tonal center, not once but several times. This is Hunter's one crack at the language of Gesualdo.

A word about madrigals and madrigalisms: 'In the madrigal, the composer attempted to express the emotion contained in each line, and sometimes individual words, of a poem.' (Attributed, by my husband, to an article copied from the ancient oracle, known as wiki.) "Madrigalism" is a term used to describe the musical devices that attempt to literally illustrate a text. Among these devices are ones that are intended for the eye rather than the ear. These are the ones that Hunter does not employ. Most of the others are deployed by Hunter: he changes the texture, tone, (particularly the harmony), range and volume to match the meaning of the text as it unfolds moment by moment.

Describing this music and its effects moment by moment is considerably more difficult than the landscape represented by the 1974 Piano Suite. It is a deeply chromatic piece with only the four musical lines to do the emoting. The human voice is nothing if not emotive. I have sung this piece (I'm an alto) many times, and each time there's a place that gives me goose bumps. I refer to the blatant open fifths and fourths twisting and turning, trying to dodge the fatal mistakes (god forbid, parallel fifths or naked fourths) that set the words 'to choke this fool.' As an alto, I find this contest of wills between my part and the tenor chilling. How did we get to this sorry pass? I do think tackling the music of the madrigal tells a truth about the way Hunter read and understood the poem. He's got enough contrapuntal skill that he can reveal his mind readily.

Manuscript, Calbraith Hunter, 1976 p 2. (Cover sheet has been omitted)

The madrigal opens with a glorious progression in E flat that establishes the tonality, I-V-I-IV, landing on the IV on the word 'not.' There is a lovely 2-1 suspension on that beat (1, bar 2), and we stay on the sweet side on the word 'to' as the line descends. The chromaticism begins with the word 'envy.' Oh, how the parallel sevenths between the bass and the tenor make the ground fall out from under one! Then, the word 'muse' is set to the harmony of the minor vi. It is a sad muse. Ha! Then, at the word 'voyeur,' the first blatant breaking of the rules occurs with parallel fifths in the bass and tenor across the bar. Unruly, wicked boys! It rapidly worsens into chromatic anguish, though there is an analysis that works: the word 'I' is set by an enharmonically spelled IV dominant 7 chord. That is out of the key of E flat, and threatens a new tonal center, D flat. Yikes. I love that the word 'I' in the soprano part "resolves" (not really!) with a 6-5 suspension. In groups that I sing this with, I usually try to get the soprano to proceed to the note d natural (! way not what we expected!) ) and the word 'she' without caesura. This jamming of I and She together really ramps up the battle of the muses!

Manuscript, Calbraith Hunter, 1976 p 3.

Now Hunter cancels the key signature and all bets are off. We've modulated on a pivot apparently, and we're now flirting with the tonality of C. The setting of the line "she beckons and thou hastens to comply" includes a few telling features. It almost seems as though we're doing a crab canon on the word beckons, but instead it dissolves into the establishment of the C major tonality via a strong expression of the dominant ninth, (implied by the a in the soprano) with a pungent 4-3 suspension that resolves on beat 1 of measure 12. There are only three voices, until the next beat, suggesting (to me) that one muse is holding back. That would be the voice of the poet, aghast at the haste of compliance. The haste is represented by the first eighth notes, and the relationship of the text to the approaching cadence is complex and telling. The word 'unseen' sneaks in (unseen!) beneath the irregular resolution to the minor vi (key of F now, wow! it was that b flat that pivoted us yet again!) on the word 'comply' (second syllable). From all of this one can appreciate how complex a composition this is and how dedicated it is to literally expressing the text. That is, after all, the madrigal approach. I think of this as more of an early baroque Italian-style piece rather than an English-style madrigal. The sonnet is English (both language and style) but the setting is Italian, or cosmopolitan, bringing many of the ancient European styles together. (That is very much like Bach. Bach suffuses the whole intellect of Cal Hunter in this phase.) Perhaps there is a connection here with Mara Monetti. She would have driven Gesualdo nuts. He hired an assassin, after all.

Manuscript, Calbraith Hunter, 1976 p 4.

Via another half step drop in pitch in the alto part (that's me!), we enter into a cadence on either our original key via IV, or a passage that really can be analyzed from the key of A flat major, depending on how you hear it. I'm hearing it as heading back to E flat, since that's where we started, and that's where we're going to end up. "Know thou there is a muse who calls my soul," is set firmly back in E flat major until we get to the word 'muse,' when as before, there is some ambiguity. Here the ambiguity is suddenly very intense. As we enter the setting of 'whose eyes burn, whose burning eyes' (Hunter alters the text to achieve his effect), we get into a very chromatic labyrinth, and it is not analyzable by the dictates of tonally centered music. It modulates continually for quite a while, covering the text all the way up to 'choke this fool.' The harmonies twist and turn, rules are bent then broken, and as I have noted, the goose bumps form on my flesh. I cannot analyze this other than as an emotional understanding of the underlying feeling of the text: it is tinged with a sense of loss and ineffable grief.  How could it be that people so young could feel this deeply? Perhaps we humans tend to harden and dry up as we mature. The old saying that youth is wasted on the young is disproved by this ancient collaboration: these young people experienced and shared their depths.

Manuscript, Calbraith Hunter, 1976 p 5.

As usual with Hunter, we're not done yet and the best is yet to be. The setting of "Thy lady rules thee, mine I'll not subdue...etc." reaches the apex of emotion in this work. It is the final third, and it soars over several tonal centers, not settling anywhere, but achingly hunting for rest, bursting out in sobs of melodic soaring and the anguish of searing harmonic shifts. When the cadence comes on the word 'grace,' I am wrung out, strung out, hung out, my soul scorched and my eyes burning. I had been chilled by the choking, but now, no joking, I'm often struggling to keep control and hold my pitches throughout this exhausting emotional passage. I hate to spoil the madrigal party and burst out in tears. Of course, it happens. I've known people to come unhinged trying to sing the "Silver Swan."

Manuscript, Calbraith Hunter, 1976 p 7.

At last, we reach the concluding invocation of inspiration and joy. We've surely earned it. We return to the opening measures, in glorious E fucking flat.  "Inspire me now that thou can'st let me go!"  Now, of course, it is the word 'go' that falls on the darkening into the minor. How clever, how beautiful, how appropriate. To make the next phrase work, with its outburst of anticipation, Hunter sets the words "my joy," amending the text. "My joy, thus give me joy to breathe!" The darkening is at an end, and the next line, about parting (though on the best of terms!), though there is an unruly fourth between bass and tenor (a passing 6-5 suspension on the first inversion of the IV chord - 6/3 - gets us here), the progression iii-vi-ii7 brings us to a cadence on the dominant (V7). The V7 is reiterated in a different position one beat later, with an added ninth for spice, and then, - finally - it resolves. The very last line, "within me be, as thy soul is of my heart," walks around the progression I-V-V of V- V7 one more time to leave the basses repeating the dominant note while the rest of us climb out over the devil and hit the tonic.

My husband is telling me we must blow out the candles and be abed. We've been at our tasks for hours. All I have to say in conclusion is that Gibbons has nothing on Calbraith Hunter.

My husband was just now chuckling as he discovered a comment on "The Silver Swan" in the wiki documents:

"Why don't you people stop arguing and just listen to the beautiful music. There is no need to interpret it, or explain it. Just listen and let it work its magic."

There's much to be said for that!