Interview, Julian Marshall and James Gilchrist on The Angel in the Forest

Premiered by James Gilchrist in 2010 and setting text by the German poet Gertrud Kolmar (a cousin of Walter Benjamin who died in Auschwitz in 1943), Julian Marshall's atmospheric song-cycle The Angel in the Forest received its world premiere recording last month on Orchid Classics, with Gilchrist joined by the Philharmonia Chamber Players and the Rupa Ensemble.

Our friends at Orchid kindly gave us permission to share this lovely conversation between Julian and James, reflecting on their first meeting and the friendship which sprang from it, their joint working process, the joys of setting and singing Kolmar's verse, and how the piece evolved during the transition from live performances to a studio setting...

Julian asks James…..

What do you remember about the first time we met… when you came down to see me when I was living in Totnes? (One thing I remember is that you literally refused to let me pick you up from the station - insisting on walking the 1.5 miles - both ways. Impressive, I thought - unless someone had already warned you about the state of my car).

JG: Oh my! What a lovely question! Well, I remember the incredibly warm welcome, and the house, which seemed so much a home, and the artworks everywhere, and Arabella, and tea and chat and how enthusiastic you were about Kolmar and the whole project. Gosh, it was a while ago now, and so much has happened since. Funnily enough, I don't remember your car at all! And I like walking. I think I am not very good at accepting help, which is a big failing.

What is it about the poet Gertrud Kolmar and her writing that you find so particularly engaging?

JG: I do indeed find her poetry engaging. In the Welten book of her poems, it's lovely to have the German and English texts facing each other side by side, and I'm so struck by how faithful and apparently simple the translation is (it never really is - it'll have taken months and agonies). But I particularly like the rambliness of her writing. No two lines are the same length, and she seems to love using parts of speech ambiguously so that you might wonder whether a word is a verb or a noun.

And I am very attracted to the way a flowing sentence can suddenly stop. And then just one word. It gives the poetry such a fragile rhythm. She seems to like thinking about the world as part of something bigger than what is around us. Creatures and objects seem to have a meaning and a connection with something that is tantalisingly out of reach of rational humans.

How many times do you repeat the word ‘squirrel' in the second movement of The Angel in the Forest? How would you explain this to someone who hasn’t heard the work before?

JG: A lot!! Hang on, it must be five times? Six? I love that bit. The running notes are so evocative of the running squirrel. A flash of red. Also, the stop/start of the vocal line. It's just what squirrels do! And the cellos seem to be flowing in a steady rhythm here, like regular trees in a wood, and the squirrel line darts in and out. She's lucky to have red squirrels. Not boring greys like us! It's surprisingly tricky to sing the right notes at that point, so I have to concentrate.

If we could take The Angel in the Forest to play live in just one venue anywhere in the world, where would you choose and why?

JG: My immediate thought is 'somewhere connected with Kolmar' but I'm not sure why. She's almost as neglected in her native land as in the English-speaking world. There was such a movement in Germany after the war to embrace modernism and to put all that came before in the attic. This is entirely impractical, but I guess 'outside, in a forest' is my answer. And definitely not in a particular forest, as honestly her conjured forests seem everywhere and nowhere all at once.

What’s your favourite answer to a composer, writing a piece for you, who asks you to specify your range?

JG: Gosh, I must have had this out with you at some stage! Sorry. I do get a bit cross when asked about 'range' as I'm not sure that that's the best way to think about a voice. People who (like you!) seem to have an ear for a voice and can imagine it singing the line they're writing just seem naturally to get it right. If you look up 'tenor voice, range' in a book it'll tell you some nonsense, but god help you if you just start writing all the notes in that range without thinking about how they fit together. I'm even a bit mystified that we have to divide voices up so much into this or that - tenor - baritone - bass-baritone - bass in the male voices - I mean you don't have one of those, do you? You just have your voice! It's how other people describe things that then tends to get one pigeonholed.

It's much more about tessitura and timbre than about limits of range, I think. Where the voice tends to "hang around" and where it sound sweetest or most dramatic or most gravelly. Where it can have power and where it can carry on a quiet tone. These are more important things to think about. Most composers, I think, end up writing for themselves, really. And if they can sing it, then it's singable. Bit of a long answer to a short question!

I was very struck by one composer's approach once: We'd been back and forth with the poetry quite a bit for this cycle of songs for voice and piano. Then I heard nothing for a bit, and then received a call saying he thought it was ready. I went round to his house and he played and sang it all through at the piano. Amazing skill to be able to do that. But you can't turn around then and say 'this is unplayable' or 'that's unsingable'. And it really worked. It was hard, but very much singable and playable.

James asks Julian…..

Kolmar's poems are in German. We're performing in a wonderful English translation. What do you think are the plusses and minuses?

JM: I’m fascinated by the idea, the art and craft, of translation. I’m thinking, just now, of Coleman Barks’ wonderful translations of Rumi or Stephen Mitchell’s translation of the Tao Te Ching. With a great translator, through an immersion of experience as expressed via the original work, a new evocation may then be passed on and passed through to a new generation – and, if skilfully achieved, the essence of the original work may be communicated, as it were, unscathed. This is very much the case, I feel, in Philp Kuhn’s and Ruth Von Zimmerman’s translation of Welten.

I also feel that, as much as I’d love to set the original German text, only having the feintest glimmer of the language renders it simply too inauthentic for me to do so. However, working with a great translation of a work alongside the original, could certainly open up a possibility for future work

I seem to sing a great many settings of poetry, and mostly people go for short poems with easy rhythm and rhyme. Kolmar's poems aren't like that at all. What is it about her writing that made you want to set it to music?

JM: Yes, they are not the most obvious poems to set, by any means! The thing is, it’s not so much the poetic form that so attracts me as much as what gets evoked through the juxtaposition of all the written elements. She does what all the best poets do, in my view, which is to reach out to express beyond what words, in of themselves, seem capable of.

It’s not in the words, but somewhere between the words or in the relationship of the words, where it seems that the expressive intent is so keenly evoked and felt. This is exactly what I think the opportunity is in all art is: to evoke experience that cannot be expressed through other means. Now if that isn’t a gauntlet thrown down for the hopeful composer, and so evident in Kolmar’s work, I don’t know what is!

Your writing seems to flow so beautifully and just come out of the air we breathe. Do you find it as easy to write as it feels? Do some things come quicker than others? What? And what is it that makes you struggle?

JM: Blimey! That’s very nice of you to say so, James… my experience as a writer actually varies enormously. The principle I work with is very much with the idea of splurge and craft. In other words, initially, once a concept or direction is identified, or felt out to some extent, I try not to think about it too much when exploring initial ideas. I then mull and mull on these ideas and, bit by bit, a crafting process more or less takes over whereby I’m trying to offer some sort of coherence to the initial ideas but in such a way that does not, I hope, feel too mannered, if you know what I mean.

Then there’s the critic for ever perched on my shoulder and saying some version of an insistent ‘not good enough’! What’s great about this critical voice is when I can hear it as push to go deeper, go further, explore more – or, perhaps, to let go and simplify. When I hear the critic as a blanket ‘not good enough’, that’s profoundly unhelpful (and actually pretty indulgent), but when I can hear it as a supportive (‘are you sure you’re not copping out’) voice, it can be irritatingly helpful!

I was really interested that you wanted the non-solo vocalists to be a very studio-y sound for the recording. Obviously when we've done live performances we've had the singers with us there. Why did you want to do it differently for the recording?

JM: Good question, James. I’ve actually always seen/heard The Angel in the Forest as a recording piece as much as a live piece. This is no doubt a hang-over form my pop recording days when I used to love the recording process and especially the idea that the ‘definitive’ version of a song was evident via the recording first. Ideally, when presenting The Angel live, I’d want the vocal group to emulate the recorded sound. Why? I think the slightly disembodied, somewhat ethereal sound suits the choral role in the piece particularly well. The vocal group offers a kind of Greek Chorus effect – a ‘comment on’ rather than a more immersive, engaged narration of events.

The first movement has a very different feel from the later ones. The scurrying pizzicato cellos are not heard later in the work. What's going on here, and why have you set it like this? I don't want to put words into your mouth, but it seems to me as a performer that the first movement is much more earth-bound, and the rest of the piece almost in a dream-world, or another dimension...

JM: Exactly, James! I actually invite you to put words in my mouth a lot more than you do, as you probably know a lot more about what I’m talking about than I do!! Indeed, the first movement has this very clear air of escape.. to the musing fields, which congenially console our roaming feet with flowers and grass…

But then the dream-state more takes over and we enter this largely surreal world, mixing a variety of powerful images in beautiful juxtaposition. It felt, when writing it, that the ‘real world’ had to be expressed in some way before the other could be allowed to take over… Mind you, it’s a real world that includes a pizzicato cello ‘machine’, a walking bass and a rather odd backing group, so it probably aint that real, when push comes to shove…!

*Welten – Gertrud Kolmar. Translated by Philip Kuhn and Ruth von Zimmermean. Published by Shearsman Books.