Texture as Form in Lili Boulanger’s "Clarières dans le ciel"

“Au pied de mon lit,” the fifth song from Lili Boulanger’s Clairières dans le ciel, is fewer than forty measures long, yet in that span it uses six distinct piano textures. Some of those textures underline shifts from one formal section to another; others happen in the middle of a section, or even the middle of a phrase. The changing accompanimental patterns, in other words, create their own form—a textural form that at times aligns with the form created by harmony and melody, but more often conflicts with it. Texture, traditionally considered a “secondary” musical parameter, has typically been seen as less essential than the “primary” parameters of melody, harmony, and rhythm; Camilla Cai, in an article about texture in Felix Mendelssohn’s and Fanny Hensel’s piano music, argues that texture has been devalued in part because it has been feminized, viewed as merely sensuous, decorative, and auxiliary. A song like “Au pied de mon lit,” however, shows that this “secondary” parameter can be of primary importance. Drawing upon recent studies of texture by Jonathan De Souza and Johanna Frymoyer, I explore the interaction of textural form and harmonic-melodic form, as well as poetic form, using several songs from Boulanger’s cycle as case studies.

Looking at her songs from this perspective—and treating texture as a driving force in her music, not just a surface feature—reveals how she ingeniously juxtaposes, blends, and transforms textures to create dynamic musical shapes. Moreover, it invites us to expand our conception of “form” in general; a single piece, I suggest, is not in a single form but in many forms at once, the number of forms dependent upon the number of parameters we attend to, the degree of correspondence or conflict among them, and the elements that captivate us most.

Stephen Rodgers is the Edmund A. Cykler Chair in Music and Professor of Music Theory and Musicianship at the University of Oregon, where he has been teaching since 2005. Rodgers’s research focuses on the relationship between music and poetry in art songs from the nineteenth century to the present day, especially art songs by underrepresented composers. He has written extensively on the songs of Fanny Hensel, one of the nineteenth century’s most prolific and innovative song composers. His edited essay collection entitled The Songs of Fanny Hensel—the first book devoted to Hensel’s contributions to the genre—was published in 2021 by Oxford University Press. A monograph on the songs of Clara Schumann is forthcoming in Cambridge University Press’s Music in Context series.

Rodgers’s work is guided by a desire to reach communities that extend beyond academia. He is a founding member of the Women’s Song Forum, an online forum devoted to women’s voices in song and geared toward a wide-ranging audience of scholars, performers, educators, and lay listeners. He has collaborated with the Hampsong Foundation, a non-profit created by the baritone Thomas Hampson that promotes intercultural dialogue and understanding through song; Hampson interviewed him on the series World of Song and, in April 2021, invited him to host programs on Marian Anderson and Mahalia Jackson, early twentieth-century women’s song, and Fanny Hensel. He is active as a tenor and frequently performs lecture-recitals for specialists and non-specialists alike. He also runs a website devoted to underrepresented composers called Art Song Augmented and hosts a podcast about poetry and song called Resounding Verse.