On the first day back of second semester in 2011, Mr. Max von Schlehenried arrived to take over from a teacher who left after first semester. Even though he taught physics, Mr. von Schlehenried has another profession which he has been practicing his whole life: musical compositions.
While practicing piano when he was 12 years old, Mr. von Schlehenried found an interest in writing music. Not until his years at St. Louis University did he study music, and specifically, compositions. Right before he graduated, Dr. Gerald Becker, one of von Schlehenried’s voice professors, commissioned him to write two songs. Since Dr. Becker’s wife Wanda was a violinist, he was a tenor, and his friend, Margaret Corey, was a pianist, he asked for songs that could be for a violin, tenor, and piano.
Mr. von Schlehenried chose two poems, “Saint Judas” and “A Blessing,” both by James Wright, a 20th century American poet, and began composing musical accompaniments in the summer of 2010. Composing the two songs in Dallas, Mr. von Schlehenried sought to bring out “unique perspectives” of the two poems. “The poems said a lot for themselves,” stated von Schlehenried, “and to me, when I was looking for material to write, they really jumped out at me because they have a very unique perspective on familiar events, like the story of Judas in the bible. We never really think, ‘Judas must have been a good person at some point in his life,’ but it is just a very interesting perspective of his story, of what he was thinking as he went out to kill himself.”
Describing “A Blessing,” von Schlehenried asserted, “‘A Blessing’ is very different. ‘Saint Judas’ is a sonnet, while ‘A Blessing’ is more of a prose style, so it’s a little different in that it doesn’t have meter or structure. It is just a simple story of two friends finding some ponies on the side of the road in Minnesota. To me, this very simple scene had a kind of gentleness to it, and at the same time a very tranquil, peaceful feeling.”
Indeed, while the poems are very different, they have some distinctive takes on everyday experiences or events that people read about often but never really reflect on. Mr. von Schlehenried did not stray from the long tradition of setting poems to music. In order to stretch the poems into 4-5 minute songs, von Schlehenried repeated lines or phrases, without changing or adding new words. Another tradition, according to Mr. von Schlehenried, is “Art-music, which is not specifically designed to be popular music. It’s not that you’re trying to write an unpopular song, but the material and harmonic structures that you’re using would fall under classical art-music, which is produced more for art purposes than for commercial purposes. However, ‘A Blessing’ could be a crossover between something that would be more of an early American folk sound.” Finishing the two compositions in September, Mr. von Schlehenried submitted his pieces where they were performed February 25, 2011 in St. Louis.
