In 1976, as the United States was celebrating
its bicentennial, I was reading a lot of American poetry
and I came across a collection called Smoke and Steel,
written by Carl Sandburg in the 1920s.
I was completely knocked out by these poems.
I had learned some of his when I was in school, but they were kind of safe.
These were super strong and provocative and took a very critical view
of the directions in which Sandburg felt American society was going.
Carl August Sandburg was born to a family of poor Swedish immigrants in 1878.
He spent much of his childhood in little towns in Illinois,
the same territory where Abraham Lincoln had grown up only decades earlier.
At the age of 13, Sandburg dropped out of school
and began working as a day laborer.
He was riding the rails on trains across the Great American West,
and in his travels, he met all kinds of working people
every social class and was deeply affected by the struggles that they faced.
Sandburg found his poetic voice
in the experiences and the language of these people.
Sandburg began to imagine himself as a true poet of the people.
He became involved in radical politics and near
the time of the first World War, he worked as an organizer for Eugene V.
Debs, a socialist party of America at the party's headquarters in Chicago.
He met his future wife, Lilian Steichen, the younger sister of the painter
and photographer Edward Steichen, who traveled in similar circles
as other radical artists, including photographers, Stieglitz
and Western painters.
Georgia O'Keeffe
and Thomas Hart Benton.
In Chicago, Sandburg also became immersed in the city's
burgeoning cultural renaissance at the Dill Pickle Club.
Chicago's popular bohemian hangout.
He read his poetry alongside literary figures like Upton Sinclair
and civil rights champion Clarence Darrow.
He also attended the club's jazz dances, and the infectious
rhythms of jazz made their way into his writing.
In addition to poetry, he wrote, what many to this day
still consider the iconic biography of Abraham Lincoln,
and he collected and performed himself a wide variety of American folk songs
and work songs, which he also published as the American Songbook.
These were the songs
he had first collected during those vagabond years of his youth.
Among the most powerful poems Sandburg ever wrote
is for preludes on Playthings of the Wind.
It's a poem whose subtext could be vanity of vanities. All is vanity.
Its subject is related to Shelley's famous poem Ozymandias,
a meditation on the ruins of the colossus of Mammon.
Sandburg imagines what the monuments of his day
like the Chicago Stock Exchange might be like as ruins in the future.
The poem asks What what does remain of those mighty societies
who built such extraordinary monuments and imagined that they would last forever?
Sandburg was concerned about the growing disparity of wealth
in America and the difference between the lives of the privileged few
versus the preservation of the many.
Since 1976, the text of this poem has haunted me
and I began to imagine how it might be set for a soprano singing,
sometimes like a pop singer and sometimes like a dramatic soprano,
how she could be backed up by two session kinds of singers,
and how the accompaniment could be provided sometimes
by a chamber orchestra and sometimes by a bar band.
In the first minutes of the piece,
the chamber orchestra states pretty much all of its main themes.
The bar band then comes crashing in, playing
the same themes, but in an entirely different style
the style of a rockabilly group of the 1950s.
Throughout the piece, the bar band keeps changing style rockabilly, funk punk,
whereas the chamber orchestra becomes more and more modern.
The two groups get thoroughly mixed up together before the soprano brings
the mood back to the quiet, meditative place of the beginning.
The two backup singers make the comment.
Yes, it's happened before happened.
Before all happened before, before, before, before.