TEXTS AND MUSIC | PROGRAM NOTES | STUDY GUIDE

Prepared for the first-year common class "The Human Impact on the Global Environmet"
Central College, Pella, IA, Fall 2004

• What are some possible meanings of the title Broken Ground?
  
  
• A basic agreement among the collaborators was to focus the poems on the four elements of earth, air, fire, and water.  How apparent are these elements in the different texts?  Do some of the poems seem more focussed on one element than on others?
  
  
• Identify relationships between the moods of the texts and the moods or energies conveyed by the music. Identify relationships between specific words and the music that accompanies them. Can you describe any of these relationships by relating specific aspects of the poems to the music's pace, the highness or lowness of sounds (register), their loudness or quietness (dynamics), the sound qualities of the different instruments or voices (timbre), or other aspects of the music?  Make a chart of the moods of the five movements and their musical traits. The program notes give some starting points.
  
  
• What reasons can you detect for the particular ordering of the poems? Try to identify a larger story that they tell or dramatic shape that they define.
  
  
• Trace the use of water-related imagery in Ray Young Bear’s poem “The Ice-Glazed Landscape of Our Grandfathers.” How do words like "whence" and "once" and "but" condition the meaning of the text?  What emotional resonances do Young Bear’s word choices convey about the landscape?
   
• Michael Carey finished his poem "Once When the Ground Was Holy" first, and all the other poets received a copy before writing their poems. In letters to the composer, Ed Hirsch described his “Ocean of Grass” as a “corrective” to Carey’s poem and Mary Swander described her poem as “playing with motifs and imagery, echoing and advancing the ideas” of Carey’s poem. Trace the relationships between Carey’s poem and these poems by Hirsch and Swander.
   
• Edward Hirsch’s “Ocean of Grass” is in the poetic form of a villanelle. Find out the traits of this form, identify the subtle modifications of lines in Hirsch’s villanelle, and comment on the significance of using such a refined poetic formula to portray this bleak story of a prairie woman.
   
• Does Ray Young Bear's poem relate to other Native American views of the land?  Does Michael Carey’s poem reflect any distinctive aspects of farmers’ relationships to the land?  How do Paula Smith and Edward Hirsch respond to their knowledge of the biology and ecology of the prairies?  What does Edward Hirsch draw out of the diaries of pioneer women in his "Ocean of Grass?"  What are the consequences of the wind and floods in Dan Hunter's and Mary Swander's poems?
  
  
• Collaboration on Broken Ground began in the summer of 1994, with the great Iowa floods of 1993 fresh in the memories of the composer and poets. The third section of Mary Swander’s poem calls up vivid images of this event. How do the poet and composer position and develop this historical event to build tension and lead ultimately to musical and poetic resolution?
   
• Print-maker Tony Crowley has made abstract images based on the music of Broken Ground, which is based in turn on the poems. Listen closely to movement one or two and try to imagine how you might translate this music or poetry into abstract visual images.
  
  
• What relationships can you trace between the images and themes conveyed by the different poems and the topics you have explored in other readings and discussions this semester