The myths came first. The hymns were drawn from an old hymnal found in a second-hand bookshop. Songs began to take shape. And through the songs Adam Guettel began to discover similarity in dissimilarity, not least our desire – as human beings – ‘to transcend earthly bounds, to bond with something or someone greater. They seemed to complement each other, reflecting different parts of us: the myths, our behaviour; the hymns, our prayers.’ Nothing changes, save the attitudes. We still want to fly high like Icarus, take wing like Pegasus, we still hope, we still pray, we still love, we still despair. Only it’s funkier now.
So Myths and Hymns is a song-cycle for our times. A Book of Life in words and music. A cosmic review. And only when you’ve made the round trip can you start to appreciate just how far you’ve travelled and how much your perspectives have shifted. Guettel is an extraordinary and provocative talent who knows no fear but the fear of complacency. It’ll never happen. The risks he takes, the challenges he sets himself – and us – are not about to bring him fame and fortune in the short term. Ironically, he has come to prominence in an age of quick fixes and easy access; an age where people hear but don’t listen. And Guettel is not always an easy listen. He’s streetwise and sophisticated – highly sophisticated. That’s a tricky combination. But he rewards you for your attention and time. And each time you come back to Myths and Hymns you’ll earn more rewards.
One interesting characteristic of Guettel’s melodic and harmonic song style (an aspect so memorably enshrined in the elaborate country-scat of his little masterpiece Floyd Collins – Nonesuch, 7/97 – which has at last made it to London) is the way in which it is constantly searching, meandering purposefully like the best jazz, taking interesting, sometimes tortuous, turns, seeking and often finding fulfilment in a consonant end-cadence. You’ll hear it in the opening hymn: ‘Children of the Heavenly King’. The final line, ‘We soon their happiness shall see’, comes to rest, like a sigh of contentment, on the last two words.
But then words and music interact, freewheel, jostle and soar here in quirky and dynamic ways. The range is quite extraordinary. And unpredictable. Stephen Sondheim’s rhythmic imperative smiles benevolently over the verbal gamesmanship of ‘Pegasus’ and ‘Sisyphus’; ‘How can I lose you?’ harkens back to an age of innocence – a wistful collusion between the worlds of musical comedy and Country and Western; ‘Come to Jesus’ (first heard on Nonesuch’s recent Audra McDonald album, 7/99) startlingly reaffirms Guettel’s theatricality, being nothing more, nothing less, than a six-and-a-half-minute music drama, a matter of life and death in which Guettel puts an unsettling new twist on the words of an old Presbyterian hymn; ‘Migratory V’ tenders an unforgettable melody; and ‘Awaiting You’ is quite simply a great song, wonderfully sung by Billy Porter, whose vocal range takes you places where nothing can touch you save the sound of his haunting falsetto. Many of these performers (all excellent) helped shape the songs in workshop. Guettel shapes and binds the whole in ways you almost don’t notice. Like the haunting chordal sequence – a kind of cyclic leitmotif – which unlocks ‘Saturn Returns’ and finds sublimation in the wordless voices of ‘The Great Highway’.
I said it when Floyd Collins first appeared, and I’ll say it again: Adam Guettel is an extraordinary new voice in American music theatre. He’s the future it lost sight of for a while. Watch him go. Unlike Icarus, I doubt he’ll get burned.ES