American Dreams

Notes on the Program

by Steven Blier

Tonight the New York Festival of Song realizes one of its dreams, as we make our first appearance at the 92nd Street Y. We’ve hosen to honor that dream with a program am of American songs exploring a range of dreams – night visions, romantic fantasies, and the capital-D American Dream, with all its promises and disappointments, our mixed salad of classical, theater, popular, and folk songs includes some of our signature pieces, as well as some more recent enthusiasms; tonight’s music and poetry run the gamut from the Freudian idea o dreams as unconscious, sometimes violent wishes, to its more benign Walt Disney update, “a dream is a wish your heart makes.”

We’re starting tonight with three songs about going to bed. The first is “Mr. and Mrs. Webb Say Goodnight,” the penultimate movement from Leonard Bernstein’s final work arias and Barcarolles, first heard in 1989. Bernstein has created a four-minute nocturnal operetta, using scat-singing, rapid patter, recitative, and swingtime, to re-create a now-famous incident in the family history of Charles and Kenda Webb. Charles Webb is the Dean of the Music School at Indiana University, and was a dear friend of the Maestro. A pair of unsupervised children are the subject of “Tumbling,” from Aaron Kernis’s two-volume song cycle, Songs of Innocents, written in 1990-91 for Dawn Upshaw. Book One sings of sweet, docile children, but Book II offers a gallery of rambunctious hell-raisers. “Tumbling,” the very last song, depicts a child whose dervish-like play finally sends him into the Land of Nod; we thought I would make a splendid duet, and the composer has fashioned a version for two voices at our request. Cole Porter’s “Wake Up and Dream” provides a world-weary adult perspective on sleep. It’s the title song from his 1929 musical revue, which was respectfully, if not enthusiastically, received on both the Broadway and London stages. It’s hard to imagine how audiences sixty-five years ago responded to the dense irony and convoluted logic of these lyrics, redolent of Porter’s Yale education. This arty barcarolle-blues is a gentle hymn to the power of fantasy and imagination – and escapism.

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