I'm Nobody, Who am I?

Boukje van Gelder

Student Number 3169227 Supervisor(s) Andrew Wright Title I'm Nobody, who am I Research Question My research question is too long for the form. Summary Emily Dickinson's poetry can be hard to understand the first time you read it. How then can the artist communicate an Emily Dickinson poem in a song in a way that an audience grasps the meaning the first time? For that reason, you need to define who you are on stage and what you want to communicate. But what do you communicate on stage when your first sentence is 'I'm Nobody!'? This research turns Nobodies into Somebodies and the other way around by looking at the voices (the characters) that are present in the poems of Emily Dickinson, specifically the poem 'I'm Nobody!'. Who speaks to whom? The research makes a journey from Emily Dickinson to scholars who write about her, composers who make songs on her poems and in the end to the performer who with all these people in her mind communicates the poem and the song to the audience. Finally, the voices in the poem become defined as various characters that can be performed on different settings of 'I'm Nobody!' by Ernst Bacon, Nick Raspa and Lori Laitman. From something vague and ungraspable the poem and its voices become very concrete and close to our own daily lives. Short Bio Mezzo soprano Boukje started singing as soon as she could speak. After her Bachelor’s in History at the Utrecht University, she decided that she wanted to explore as much as possible about singing. In 2017 she graduated from the Fontys Conservatory in Tilburg and started her Master's in the Royal Conservatoire. Currently, she studies with Catrin Wyn-Davies. Boukje performed as a soloist in different concerts. She sang, for example, the alto solos in Bach’s St Matthew Passion, Haydn’s Stabat Mater, Rossini's Petite Messe Solennelle and she sang the role of Hänsel in the staged opera of Hänsel und Gretel from Humperdinck.

7. Conclusion

This research includes various characters in three settings of the poem ‘I’m Nobody’. The research question was:

How can a deeper understanding of the variety of voices in three musical settings of Emily Dickinson’s poem ‘I’m Nobody!’ give insight in the possible interpretations of songs with respect for the interpretations that are visible in the choices of the composers?

Halfway through this research, there were so many interpretations of who Emily Dickinson was and what her poems meant that it started to be confusing. This confusion turned out to be very useful for answering my research question. Understanding the poem in different and contrasting ways was crucial to find possible interpretations for the three songs because if the composers understood it within their own frame of thought, they will all have a different interpretation. It was nice to experience three musical settings that were very different from each other, so the characters could be very diverse.

Emily Dickinson was a master in changing the way she spoke according to her audience. She was able to manipulate people into seeing their opinions reflected in her writings, so they would not feel uncomfortable. We live in an era in which everybody is allowed his own opinion. These opinions are reinforced by our own environment. Our opinions are part of our identity, changing it can be weird for the outside world and this results in very rigid opinions.

With this research, I broke through my own barrier of beliefs. Finding out different perspectives about being a Nobody, helped me to create different characters that could be a Nobody. When finding the right interpretation for one song, you can find yourself in a tunnel vision of what you think it means. You can limit yourself in the possible options you have to perform the song, by just making one analysis and treat it as the one. This problem is solved by finding more than one interpretation and therefore more than one character. It keeps the poem and the songs fresh, even if you have to recite or sing it very often. This is very valuable as a performer because if you feel bored by a song or aria, the audience will also feel bored.

There is not one character that fits best on the poem, nor on one of the three settings. I was already used to play a character in a poem in art-song, but I never really researched so many possibilities of who I could play of who the ‘I’ was. The fact that the ‘I’ was a ‘Nobody’ made the possibilities even more shifty. If you are Nobody, do you have to be Somebody or can you be Anybody? I tried to not become the frog.

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7. Conclusion