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Dr. Gordon Sly finds inspiration for his creative life woven throughout articles, nonfiction books and essays associated with his professional life. He admires the power and clarity of expression characteristic of some of his favorite authors like Christopher Hitchens, Susan Sontag, David Frum, James Baldwin, George Santayana, and David Sedaris. With his latest book, the Michigan State University College of Music professor of music theory hopes to educate, inspire, and influence in a similar way.

Dr. Sly has taught at MSU since fall 1999. Over the last 24 years, he has written, contributed to, and co-edited three books or collections of essays. His latest book, Britten’s Donne, Hardy and Blake Songs: Cyclic Design and Meaning, is his first single-author monograph and delivers an in-depth, analytical study focusing on the overarching designs of Benjamin Britten’s John Donne, Thomas Hardy, and William Blake solo song cycles. 

The various poems, proverbs, and songs were composed in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, each representing a philosophical exploration. They are interconnected in both a poetic and musical arrangement, forming not just a collection, but a cycle. For Dr. Sly, the writing process for this 198-page book was long and circuitous given the multiple songs and texts to evaluate. 

“I lived with the music—listening to it, studying the scores—for some time,” he said. “Each cycle sets wonderful and challenging poetry, so text analysis, as well as analysis of musical design, was a substantial part of the work. It’s important for me to develop an analytical argument—a central idea about how a piece ‘works’—before the actual writing begins. The writing itself came fairly quickly, but the full process unfolded over several years.”

The result is a book that discusses cyclic designs and how they work in larger architectures. Published earlier this year by Boydell & Brewer on the Boydell Press imprint, Dr. Sly shows that Britten's choice of texts and arrangements reveal his “extra-musical communication” in these cycles.

“Britten’s cyclic designs — the plans that inform his selection and arrangement of poems to create patterns of associations — are developed with great care. In interviews over the years, the composer noted more than once that a piece is ‘completely finished…and then the notes are chosen,’” Dr. Sly said. “These poetic designs he can then support by musical means — melodic or harmonic motives, key associations, etc. — as he composes each song in a cycle. As with so much of Britten’s music, these works were prompted by experiences in the composer’s life and carry powerful allegorical narratives, expressed, as I’ve tried to show, in his cyclic architectures.”

Dr. Sly hopes the book provides readers with an introduction to Britten’s music and an appreciation for his important contributions. 

“Britten’s songs belong to a tradition largely forged, and most conspicuously represented, by Schubert and Schumann in the early-to mid-19th century, one that continued through Brahms, Wolf, Mahler, and so on, and into the 20th and 21st centuries,” he said. “A central quality of this music — perhaps the central quality — is that composers do more than provide a text with an appropriate accompaniment; they interpret, complete, add to a poem. In this way, poetry and music combine to create something more powerful than the sum of the two.”

Dr. Sly’s previous works include Keys to the Drama: Nine Perspectives on Sonata Forms, for which he was the editor and chapter author, and Twentieth- and Twenty-First-Century Song Cycles: Analytical Pathways Toward Performance, which he co-edited with colleague Michael Callahan, and to which he contributed a chapter. He also contributed a chapter to Essays on Benjamin Britten from a Centenary Symposium, published by Cambridge Scholars.