Songs:
i. The Ballad of the Landlord, by Langston Hughes
ii. This Tree, by William Whitehead
iii. Madam and the Rent Man, by Langston Hughes
iv. Tenants, by Hannah Sullivan
The stimulus for Rent Songs came about after I had once again found myself packing up all my belongings to move to yet another house. The village we moved to, Nuneham Courtenay in Oxfordshire, turned out to have its own curious tenancy story, and it provided the text for the second of the three songs in the work. The village had originally been close to the grand house of the Nuneham Estate, just by the Thames, but the Earl wanted to move the entire village in order to make way for a landscaped garden designed by Capability Brown. In order to placate the tenants, a new village was built, and they moved around 1761. One tenant, Barbara Wyatt, who was in her 80s and recently widowed, asked to be allowed to remain in the old village until her death, due both to her age and to the fact that she had planted the large tree in her garden as a child and wished to stay with it. In a rather surprising act of benevolence on the part of the Earl, she was allowed to stay and the then Poet Laureate, William Whitehead, wrote a poem to commemorate this – though one wonders whether the Earl himself commissioned the poem as an act of self-aggrandisement! Nevertheless, the poem can now be found in the local church, carved into a piece of wood that was once placed in front of ‘Babs’s elm’.
The
first song is a setting of one of Langston Hughes’s many poems that take aim at unscrupulous landlords. Here, a tenant complains to the landlord about the state of their abode, but before long the tenant is thrown in jail. To obtain the musical material for the piece, I transcribed into musical notation a reading of the poem by the African American actor and activist Ossie Davis. While it was not my original intention, I ended up harmonising much of the material with jazz harmonies that his speech melodies seemed to imply. I play lots of jazz myself, so I was struck by how often Davis’s phrases contained idiomatic ‘chromatic enclosures’ and consisted of notes drawn from seventh chords and the like.
'Tenants', the final of the three songs, is a setting of a passage from Hannah Sullivan’s poem of the same name, which acts as an elegy for those who died in the Grenfell Tower fire. She writes of the inequalities observed while living nearby, perhaps most poignantly the contrast between water sprinklers in the posh Notting Hill gardens that June evening in 2017 and the ones in the Tower. Where Sullivan used the voices of survivors and extracts from the Grenfell Inquiry in her work, I instead looked to some of the points in time she references – the beginning of the fire at 12:54 and dawn at 04:44 – to provide central pitch material for the piece.