Setting Samuel Menashe’s poetry to music

Composer Ben Yarmolinsky is a professor of music at the Bronx Community College of the City University of New York and a founding member and director of Friends and Enemies of New Music, an organization that has been presenting concerts of contemporary music in New York since 1989. Recently he released the CD, Paradise: Songs on Poems of Samuel Menashe, and he explains how he came to set Samuel’s poetry to music.

I knew Samuel Menashe for the last seven years of his life. We were introduced in the spring of 2004, at the cocktail party following the annual awards ceremony of the American Academy of Arts & Letters. Samuel did not receive an award from the Academy on that day—nor on any other day.

In the years 2005 through 2010, I set many of Samuel’s poems to music, usually for solo voice accompanied by guitar or piano. Eventually, I accumulated almost forty Menashe songs. Samuel attended every performance of these songs, and was generous in his praise of them. He wrote: “Yarmolinsky takes note of my poems. His settings make each word a note.” One of my most prized souvenirs of our friendship is a printed card of his poem “Hallelujah” underneath which he wrote “For Ben Yarmolinsky who set my poems to music, lifted me to his level. De la musique avant toute chose.”

In December of 2013, I released a CD of my settings of 37 of Samuel’s poems. Here is one of the songs from the CD, sung by baritone Randall Scarlata:



Night Music
(pizzicato)

Why am I so fond
Of the double bass
Of bull frogs
(Or do I hear the prongs
Of a tuning fork,
Not a bull fiddle)
Responding—
In perfect accord—
To one another
Across this pond
How does each frog know
He is not his brother
Which frog to follow
Who was his mother
(Or is it a jew’s harp
I hear in the dark?)

This poem presents a wonderful opportunity for text painting. In my arrangement the left hand “ribbet” motive of the piano is imitated closely by the bass notes of the cello, and echoed by the strings and percussion, so that the listener has the sense of many frogs “responding in perfect accord to one another.” I like to think of my songs as a kind of response to Samuel’s harping.

• Paradise: Songs on Poems by Samuel Menashe is available as a CD or music download from cdbaby.com, iTunes, Amazon, cdUniverse.com, or directly from the composer, at benyarmolinsky.com.
• The e-book edition of Samuel Menashe: New and Selected Poems is on sale for the month of April, for as low as $3.82 for Kindle, Kobo, Google Books, Nook, and iBooks (via iTunes).
• Watch “Samuel: The Concise Poet,” a three-minute episode of WNYC’s Know Your Neighbor featuring Samuel Menashe and his dilapidated West Village walk-up apartment.

Lyrics copyright © Literary Classics of the U.S., Inc. Music copyright © Ben Yarmolinsky.
All rights reserved.