Shadow of the Blues

four songs to poems by Langston Hughes

Silhouette

Litany

Island

Could be

Langston Huges and John Musto, though born nearly fifty years apart, have a significant characteristic in common, which is their love of jazz and the blues. Hughes’s verse is permeated by jazz rhythms and, indeed, he went so far as collaborate with musicians to realise the music he heard in his mind but did not have the technique to write down. Musto is the son of a jazz guitarist and, while on the one hand he had the distinction of being nominated for a Pulitzer Prize for his song cycle Dova Sta Amore and later achieved much success with his opera Volpone, he is admired on the other hand as a “sterling performer of ragtime and stride piano music.” So he is clearly well qualified to join the long line of composers – from the Dvorák pupil Harry T. Burleigh to Kurt Weill and Zemlinsky – who have set Hughes’s words to music.

Like the opening song of Shadow of the Blues, which is an ironically casual treatment of a grim subject, much of Hughes’s poetry derives its inspiration from the African-American experience. Musto’s setting of Silhouette, with its popular-song inflections and it subtle echoes of Broadway, is correspondingly light in manner. Framed by its contemplative piano prelude and postlude, Litany is in gospel mode – which, bearng in mind the last line, is another irony. Island precariously floats its vocal line on a flux of agitated piano figuration (later incorporated, incidentally, in a piano concerto). The blues number is the witty Could be, which is thoroughly idiomatic in its harmonic, melodic and rythmic allusions and yet far from being a pastiche.