All in the Sound

Hot on the heels of his 2021 album STORIES OUT OF CHERRY STEMS, this latest vocal music album from Baltimore-based composer Peter Dayton continues to establish him as a mature and formidable talent in the art song world. ALL IN THE SOUND drills down into the heart of the genre: duet between voice and accompaniment. Dayton’s music realizes the achingly poignant possibilities inherent in this duet.

The work of this album is made all the sweeter given its context. Every piece was recorded in summer 2021, shortly after vaccines for COVID-19 became widely accessible in the United States. For the featured musicians, this album was the first in-person recording project they were able to undertake in over a year. The joy of social reconnection and returning to communal music making is palpable across the album. In addition to the communities established within the recording studio for this project, community resonates across the album in other ways. Many pieces have been commissioned by friends, such as the title song set All in the Sound, commissioned by the soprano Katie Procell who performs it; or Fresh in the Triumph, commissioned by the husband of a dear friend for his spouse’s birthday. Similarly, Dayton composed A Red, Red Rose as a meaningful gift for dear friends – an engaged couple geographically separated for months by the pandemic.

Often in reaction to the text he has chosen to set, Dayton begins his compositional process by developing an internal logic for each composition. For example, “Evening,” the third movement from the cycle Just a Leaf: Three Natural Songs, rests on a foundation of continual expansion and collapse between the intervals of a fourth and a sixth, most audible in the accompaniment. From the germinative seed of these alternating intervals, the piece grows into an evocative depiction of a winter evening with trees singing in the wind. His approach echoes the way some poets find it easier to expand their creativity by using “restrictive” poetic forms defined by rhyming or metric conventions.

This internal-logic approach also ensures that Dayton stays creatively fresh when composing accompaniment – especially for the piano. Perhaps because of his facility with improvisation, he finds it all too easy to fall into instinctual voicings, hand positions, or registrations when playing piano. In reaction, his compositional approach results in sometimes extremely challenging piano parts. Rejecting musical complacency, he writes for the piano in ways that are at once complex, technically challenging, and musically interesting.

For Dayton, the technique of first establishing a piece’s internal logic is vital for musical success. He notes that he prefers not to compose exclusively using the metric of what he “likes” or what sounds “good” or “natural.” Were he to take this approach, he declares laughingly, his entire output would luxuriate in a “soup” of minor ninth chords. Instead, working within pre-established restrictions facilitates his creative decision-making. Inside the rules he sets for himself, he measures success when a piece also becomes viscerally satisfying to the senses. And this album does not disappoint.

The care and attention that Dayton uses to craft each single movement can also be found in his organization of this album. Listeners will perceive several different trajectories or threads connecting the album together – for example, the trajectory of the poets whose texts Dayton sets. The first six songs and cycles feature American modernist poets, before transitioning in Like a Red, Red Rose to poets from the British Isles. Of particular note, Dayton himself wrote the text for the closing piece, Fresh in the Triumph, based on Virginia Woolf’s novel Mrs. Dalloway. Woolf’s novel establishes a pessimistic refrain, quoting a funeral song, Fear no more… from Shakespeare’s play Cymbeline, embodying the fatalistic notion that only death can be a release from care, toil, and fear. In his own words, Dayton rebuts this sentiment, emphasizing the transcendent quality our passing moments take on. Here, Ben Hawker’s soaring Broadway-style tenor suggests that we can instead survive in those instances forever.

Another trajectory is that of instrumentation. Dayton plays with our expectations as audiences of art song, juxtaposing the “traditional” instrumentation of voice and piano with other instrumentations: voice and violin, voice and harp, voice and guitar, and voice and celesta. Piano accompaniment bookends the album, and the other instrumental accompaniments lie at the album’s heart. The inclusion of the penultimate song cycle The Second Coming, a piece for horn and four low voices, augments this contrast. These comparisons collectively reveal the hallmark intimacy and community at the heart of Dayton’s music.

If the poems and the instrumentation form the “warp” and “weft” of the tapestry that is ALL IN THE SOUND, the route through the texts provides the tapestry with its “color.” For this album, Dayton presents a “color wheel” that contrasts the power, beauty, and rhetorical impact of the poetic imagery. All in the Sound and Just a Leaf evoke emotion using natural imagery. Botticellian Trees, with delicious text painting in the violin, continues in this nature image-based vein, before transitioning to the increasingly abstract If They Delight and Beyond Dimension. Like a Red, Red Rose features an almost perfect Venn diagram of physical, emotional, and abstract imagery. In contrast, the almost constant rhythmic churning of the celesta in Wilde Colours marries the physical senses with the emotions, and The Second Coming is literally occult. Dayton closes the album with the sharp, poignant, tear-inducing Fresh in the Triumph, which uses the language of 1990s folk-pop Broadway musicals to craft a clear counterargument to the fog-filled chromatic harmonies of The Second Coming. In this closing piece — and the album as a whole — Dayton has made robust, powerful contributions to the world of art song that will continue to inspire.

-Dr. Ryan A Koons, Ph.D