We received six excellent entries to our “Setting MacDonald to Music” competition, in honor of George’s upcoming 200th birthday. After much deliberation, the judges decided to split the first-place award between two especially superb compositions by Rebecca Abbott and Barbara Amell.
Rebecca L. Abbott: “He Has Begun a Story”
Barbara Amell: “Love is Home”
Rebecca L. Abbott holds a BMus from Wheaton College with studies in voice, organ, music theater, and English literature, including intensive study of mythology and George MacDonald with Rolland Hein; an MA in liturgy and the arts from Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, with sacred music at Boston University; and a DWS from the Institute for Worship Studies. Serving as an instructor in hymnology at the Sacred Music Institute of America, she also enjoys translating and versifying texts and working with musicians in French- and German-speaking countries. She is currently touring with "As a Matter of Fancy," her debut solo album of original compositions, which can be heard through links at rebeccaabbott.hearnow.com, and is also performing literary songs on pipe organ as the Singing Organist.
Of her submission to the George MacDonald music competition, Abbott says, "I grew up among my father's thousands of books on the Inklings and their inspirations, which included MacDonald's fantasy works and other fiction. I was especially taken with C. S. Lewis's understanding of myth as a 'gleam' of truth falling on the imagination—at one point, I even worked on memorizing his 'Weight of Glory' essay in both English and German!—and found this thought presented even more enticingly in MacDonald's Phantastes; the world of 'Faerie invade[s] the world of men' (ch. 13). I wanted to tie it in more deliberately with the idea of story, so opened with a phrase the fairies say to mock the main character: 'He has begun a story without a beginning, and it will never have an end' (ch. 8).
"Those words suggested beginning the song in the middle, as it were, without any more introduction than an arresting chord—a first invasion of Faerie. A couple different keys for the song are suggested simultaneously throughout, like the overlayering of two worlds at once. Then we hear a couple measures of higher notes, suggesting 'the lights and influences of the upper worlds,' which then descend into our world. I did close with the same chord as the opening, but an octave higher, which is my interpretation of the worlds joining more closely, of our being lifted up into the other realms that even now saturate our own."
Barbara Amell: When setting a poem by George MacDonald to music, it is helpful to know that MacDonald had his own theories regarding the blending of these two art forms. “Poetry,” he reportedly told a lecture audience, “especially required to be read aloud. It was meant not for the eye but for the ear . . . He could count on his fingers easily the men he knew—and the women too—who seemed to have a delicate appreciation of spoken sound, whereas there were multitudes who had it in regard to instrumental or singing sound, but the appreciation of the change of vowels, of rhythm, of measure, whether it was from the lack of education in that direction or the lack of natural gift, seemed to him to be a rare thing. If by reading aloud anything could be done to make the charm, the melody of verse—which was the change of vowel sound in the verse—felt, or to make the power felt, or the rhythm felt, or the whole tone of the thing, which lay at the root of it all felt, then reading aloud was the right thing to do.”
One of MacDonald’s most frequent lecture subjects was The Art of Poetry, Illustrated by Tennyson’s Lyrics, in which he emphasized that the foundation of poetry must involve musicality. “First of all, they wanted music. If the first thing they found on examining poetry was that it had not music, then to the fire with it—it was an imposter! . . . But they wanted ten times more than music. They wanted strength, and if they had strength, music would mostly come.”
MacDonald always referenced the intermingling of poetry and music in his lectures on John Milton. “If poetry is worth anything, it ought to be musical . . . Why not wrote prose, if you do not make it musical? . . . No line of Milton’s sinned against music, which embodied all the laws of order and beauty.” MacDonald believed that the organ music of Milton’s father had been a major influence upon young Milton’s poetry. “His brain was in early youth flooded with the sounds of music from the organ in his father’s house; and his (the lecturer’s) conviction was that in Milton’s blank verse—the first grand blank verse that ever was written—could be heard over again, when it was read aloud, the grandeur of the music of the organ.” In MacDonald’s novel Alec Forbes of Howglen, the child Annie reads Milton’s Paradise Lost, “of which when she could not make sense, she at least made music—the chorus of old John Milton’s organ sounding through his son’s poetry in the brain of a little Scotch lassie who never heard an organ in her life.”
The artistic and spiritual connections between music and poetry are surely best brought out by the quality of the inspiring source. I was privileged to compose songs set to George MacDonald’s poems, and a suite for piano inspired by his Dealings With the Fairies for some of the past C.S. Lewis & Friends Colloquiums at Taylor University. Thanks to Jess Lederman’s generosity, composers have the opportunity to find their musical inspiration in the poetry of George MacDonald for the bicentenary celebrations. My choice, “Love Is Home,” is from MacDonald’s Violin Songs. This poem appealed to me for its combination of precision and wildness, representing both the duty and the freedom involved in coming home to the God worth believing in. My sincere thanks to sublime soprano Dru Rutledge for singing it so beautifully.