Tag: music

Margaret Vetare, Herman Melville, and WNYC’s Public Song Project

In May the singer-songwriter Margaret Vetare, a college friend, told me that she’d submitted a song to WNYC’s “Public Song Project” which showcases new recordings of songs made from works in the American public domain. The songs can be based on poems, books, films, existing songs, and even fictional characters. The Project announced six winners at the end of July and performed them on August 2 in front of the Brooklyn Public Library in New York City. All songs can be streamed from the “Public Song Book” online.  

Simon Close, the creator of the Public Song Project for public radio station WNYC, introduced the project’s mission and ethos in a radio special he emceed on July 26th:

We are about to embark on a journey across your airwaves. There is no need for a license. A passport is of no use for this flight. Your ticket is free. We are going to a place where property is a thing of the past and royalty is a relic. It’s a conceptual commons of creativity, where the air itself is made of music and ideas, and inspiration is one breath away. Our destination: The public domain. 

In other words, not everything in American culture is for sale and profiteering.

The Public Domain Review and the Center for the Study of the Public Domain announced that on January 1, 2025, the following works among others entered the public domain, making them available for adaptation and fueling their circulation and preservation:

Margaret Vetare’s submission to the Public Song Project was a folk adaptation of Herman Melville’s poem “Shiloh: A Requiem (April, 1862).” Her song received a special call-out by judge Ricardo Maldonado, president and executive director of the Academy of American Poets, for being a “sacred incantation, a cathedral of a rendition.” To hear the song, click the link below; see Melville’s words below it:

Song credits: Margaret Vetare, arrangement, guitar, and vocal, Tom Grasso, harmony vocal, Greg Anderson, mandolin; recorded by Billy Straus and Greg Anderson.

“Shiloh” was a battle in the American Civil War, the bloodiest to date of any American war. It was so named because it took place on April 6-7, 1862, in Western Tennessee near the Shiloh log church. The battle was instigated by the Confederate Army following several defeats, and it led to almost 24,000 casualties on both Confederate and Union sides, including the death of the Confederate general Albert S. Johnston, and the retreat by the Confederate Army into Mississippi to the south. 

I asked Margaret how she came to choose this particular song to set to music, and she replied:

Every now and then when I just feel like reading a poem, I’ll take the old Norton Anthology of Poetry off the shelf, and apparently sometime in 2011, which I think is when I wrote this music, I was thumbing through and just stumbled on this page – thought “that looks interesting” – and almost immediately felt that it needed to be a song. It was a very instantaneous feeling…I probably just liked that image right away of the swallows skimming over the field, and then I realized where the poem was going. It’s so peaceful when it starts out…(but) it’s a field of people mown down.

It is only because of Margaret that I found out that Melville (1819-1891), better known as the author of that Great American Novel Moby Dick (1851), spent the latter part of his life writing enough Civil War poems to comprise a collection, Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War (1866).

Musically, though Margaret instantaneously felt the poem needed to be a song, she couldn’t find any consistent rhythm, since the stanzas change size and rhyme schemes: “That’s why it was an interesting challenge to me as a songwriter,” she said. What leapt out at her besides rhythm were the internal alliterations, such as 

As she looked for a rhythm, Margaret noticed that “there could almost be a ‘Johnny-Comes-Marching-Home-Again’ (long-short-short, rat-a-tat 6/8) meter to some of the lines: Over the field in clouded days, / The forest-field of Shiloh—  / Over the field where April rain / Solaced the parched ones stretched in pain.” She thought of this marching rhythm playing against the swooping wheeling imagery of the birds, whose flight was the only remaining action on the field after the battle. “You know, if you watch swallows fly, they really do skim, they kind of swoop around, scooping up insects as they go, and it’s a loose feeling.”

Amid this tension between marching and skimming and wheeling, it was more the latter loose rhythm she chose to emphasize, with a particular emphasis on the parenthetical line “(What like a bullet can undeceive!).” Margaret explains: 

What appealed to me was the parenthetical clause. It’s the crux of the poem. What are the deceptions he (Melville)’s talking about? I think there are two main deceptions. One is, of course, that war is a glorious thing, that you’re going to fight for glory, you’re going to gain glory fighting for a noble cause. There’s just nothing glorious about this scene. That’s one main deception. And the other deception is the idea that someone who is ostensibly your foeman is truly an enemy. When you are on the battlefield, and your “foes” are groaning and bleeding and dying and praying just like you, they’re your fellow man. The common humanity is so obvious in that moment. So it’s these deceptions that the bullet can unmask. I love the colloquialness of it – ‘what like a bullet can undeceive?’ – it’s kind of like nothing else is going to teach you more than getting your innards blown out. 

The fact that Melville put the line in parentheses calls attention to it rather rendering it less important, she said: “That parenthetical is really important to me and I made a musical choice around that to make it its own line that doesn’t sound like any other line.”

For me, the sweeping, swooping swallow imagery reminded me of the start of William Butler Yeats’ later poem “The Second Coming” (1920) about a shift in a world order: 

So then we got talking about a bit about politics. In the weeks leading up to WNYC’s release of the songs, its radio special, and its public concert, Congress passed rescissions to the federal funds already awarded to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB). Through these funds CPB supports more than 100 public TV and radio stations; the rescissions will likely have an effect not only on whether these stations can survive but also on the volume and type of public media content that can be produced. The Public Song Project has been going on for 3 years running, but its future now seems uncertain. Like many things, it should be saved. It’s a celebration of what is public, what is ours, our common humanity, our collective past, our collective future. 

More at lit-alive.com