Harry Dotson was a good 7th-grade science teacher, so far as I could tell, but he was not the man to direct a play.

His closely cropped red hair was turning white. His crow’s feet wrinkles were gouging deep canyons outward from the corners of his eyes. His nose gotten itself smashed at some point and we wondered if he had seen action in the boxing ring in his younger days. His expression was sardonic though I wouldn’t have known that word back then.

He had the gravitas that comes with age, another word I wouldn’t have known. He seemed to be in slow motion, always. He moved slow, he spoke slow. Slow-ly. He was effective; he introduced us to Roy G Biv and Aitch Two Oh.

The Jr. High School in Lexington, Ohio presented a play every spring. Having employed no drama teacher, the school appointed Mr. Dotson to direct these productions. I auditioned and landed a small part. None of us, perhaps least of all Mr. Dotson, were certain what all a director was supposed to do.

At the first rehearsal, Mr. Dotson passed out scripts and sat us in a circle. As we read our lines aloud, Mr. Dotson, head down, followed the script and listened. That was all he did. Just listen.

After a few weeks, our lines memorized, we rehearsed on the stage just beyond the basketball hoop at one end of the school gym. Mr. Dotson made sure that we entered and exited from “stage right” or “stage left” (terms new to me). He pulled together some shabby upholstered furniture, a shelf of used books, a few framed art prints and French doors with a fake tree just outside to suggest the living room of the country estate where the action of the play was to unfold. He rounded up props and made sure that the stage crew placed them where they belonged.

As for blocking, pacing, expression, characterization, we were on our own. We did our best. So far as we could tell, the production seemed to be coming together.

There was one minor problem.

In one of the dialogues there were three or four lines which made no sense to us. We asked Mr. Dotson to explain what this exchange meant.

Frowning with concentration, he examined the passage for much longer than I thought would be required to read a few lines.

At length, he lifted his gaze from the script and considered our faces, one by one.

Then he said, in his deliberate, authoritative way, “There is an ancient tradition of the theatre, practiced by playwrights for centuries -- Sophocles, Euripides, Shakespeare, all of them, even playwrights who are alive today. They always insert into each and every play a few lines that make no sense. Playwrights are artists and artists are eccentric. They do things like this; no one knows why. You are smart kids and you have discovered the exact lines in this particular play that make no sense. Just say them anyway. No harm will come of it. It keeps the tradition alive.”

We were surprised by this explanation but we bought it. We felt proud to know that we were smart enough to identify the lines in this particular play which the playwright had deliberately inserted so as to continue the tradition of 'the lines that made no sense.'

We performed the play for an audience of our parents, grandparents and siblings, all of them seated in folding metal chairs arranged in rows on the shiny, hardwood gym floor. When it was over, we took our bow as our relatives applauded. That was that.

From then on, every time I saw a play I paid very close attention so that I could be sure to spot the three or four meaningless lines that the playwright had slyly inserted into the script. I ALWAYS found them. They were ALWAYS there, waiting to be identified, 'the lines that made no sense.' It was part of the fun of seeing a play, an element of the theatre-going experience. I liked being in on an ancient, esoteric theatrical tradition.

When I was in college it occurred to me that Mr. Dotson’s explanation was odd. What playwright would impose intentionally meaningless lines on the actors who presented his plays? When a play's lines had seemed meaningless to me, was it possible that I had simply missed the meaning? Had the meaning of the lines had been there all along, plain as the nose on my face? Perhaps I was not as smart as I had thought.

Or had Mr. Dotson, unable to explicate the puzzling lines in our play, feigned a deep knowledge of the theatre, invented an arcane tradition on the spot so as to avoid admitting that he had no more notion of what the lines meant than we did? Maybe he hadn’t bothered to carefully read the script, hadn’t required himself to comprehend all the lines. Sophomoric, I dismissed him as a fish out of water, a 7th grade science teacher directing a play. Harrumph.

However, as the decades have drifted by, the matter seems less clear.

It’s just possible that Mr. Dotson, possessed of a dry, inventive sense of humor, fashioned a kind of gift for us, a quasi-explanation that would keep us wondering for years to come.

Then again, perhaps he was sharing his honest response to the deliberate ambiguity that is to be found in almost all art forms? Deliberate ambiguity is much admired and discussed, a hallmark of the greatest art. It’s one reason why masterworks continue to intrigue us. We can’t entirely explain the characters we know as Hamlet, MacBeth, King Lear and a host of others. If we could explain them, we’d have tired of them long since.

There ARE, of course, entire plays that are deliberately absurd. 'Theatre of the Absurd' was all the rage among European playwrights in the 1950’s, just a few years before I performed in the annual theatrical production at Lexington Jr. High School. Maybe Mr. Dotson, a teacher in rural Ohio, had heard about 'Theatre of the Absurd' and was applying his newfound knowledge.

Many an avant garde non-play, non-novel, abstract ballet, post-post-modern painting or sculpture has made a Big Splash. Catching a distant echo of such goings-on, Mr. Dotson might have slowly shrugged his big shoulders, concluding that if parts or even all of these works made no sense, well, considering that playwrights are artists, it was to be expected.

Dotson’s dictum: “Artists are eccentric."

What about music? Have composers deliberately inserted a meaningless phrase into an otherwise logical composition? Not the undersigned. Could there be such a thing as 'Music of the Absurd?' Non-music? Anti-music? Not in my œuvre. Nor in any serious musical expression, according to Leonard Berstein.

Maestro Bernstein, writing in 1966, a few years after Mr. Dotson was, perhaps, coming to terms with 'Theatre of the Absurd,' observed:

“What works in other arts does not necessarily work in music. We are constantly hearing negative phrases: anti-art, anti-play, anti-novel, anti-hero, non-picture, non-poem. [Such works] attract a large following, even succeed in moving us deeply.
[A list of such works] could become a very long indeed; but there is one thing it could not include -- a piece of serious anti-music. Music cannot prosper as a non-art, because it is basically and radically an abstract art, whereas all the other arts deal with real images -- words, shapes, stories, the human body.
Music must be excluded from this tendency in the arts … because it is abstract to start with; it deals directly with the emotions through a transparent medium of tones which are unrelated to any representational aspects of living.”

Maestro Bernstein's thoughts bring me to the music I hope to share with you today. A setting of Walter de la Mare’s strange, cold, distant, beautiful poem, “Wanderers,” the music, in order to suit the text, had to be commensurately beautiful, distant, cold and strange.

But not devoid of meaning, not absurd. If it seems meaningless and absurd to you, please give the song a second listen, maybe a third.

Hopefully, you’ll find that the weirdness is apt, after all, even beautiful in an other-worldly way. This music didn't emerge from my usual ‘neck of the woods.’ It’s not what you’ve come to expect from your dear old Uncle Rick, but it might intrigue you.

Here's the poem:

Wanderers by Walter de la Mare

Wide are the meadows of night,
And daisies are shining there,
Tossing their lovely dews,
Lustrous and fair;

And through these sweet fields go,
Wanderers ‘mid the stars --
Venus, Mercury, Neptune,
Saturn, Jupiter, Mars.

Attired in their silver, they move,
And circling, they whisper and say,
Fair are the blossoming meads of delight
Through which we stray.

To hear the rich, dark mezzo voice of Susan Olson singing “Wanderers,” from my cycle “Silvery Songs” for mezzo, flute and piano, click on the link above.

To see a PDF of the score, click on the link above.

🎶 🎶 🎶 🎶 🎶

Most mornings, I rise very early, often at 5:30. I take my cup of coffee with me on a little tour around our lovely home, seeing it with fresh eyes. During the warmer seasons, I do the same in the garden. At that hour, only a few sleepy bird calls are heard. Looking up through the branches of the mighty old pines at the far edge of our garden, the stars, glowing brightly, almost seem to be floating among the pine boughs like fire flies or silver fish in a dark pond, beyond my reach, to be sure, but seemingly only about a few dozen feet away.

Have you seen Sirius at that hour, blazing away, low on the southeastern horizon? It’s a sight to behold.

Have you seen those mind-distending images provided us by the Webb telescope?

The stars, the distant galaxies, how shall we respond to them?

R.L. Stevenson wrote:

“All we can do is to stand down here in the garden and take off our hats and let the star-shine light upon our heads. That is all we shall ever have to do with the stars.”

Ah, but Mr. Stevenson, there is one other thing we can do as regards the stars. We can do what you did, following your example. We can “let the star-shine light upon” our art -- our prose, our poetry, our music. We can respond to the stars by fashioning an artifice -- a poem or a song -- that tries to express the emotions awakened in us by the stars.

Setting to music Walter de la Mare’s strange, chilly, distant, beautiful poem, “Wanderers”, striving to make the words and the music “describe each other,” I tried to conceive melodies and harmonies that would feel comparately beautiful, distant, chilly and strange.

To do that, I had to foray out of my musical ‘comfort zone,’ skirting the edge of the dark forest that lies beyond the usual chord progressions, the ones close to the tonic, close to home. I had to enter the zone where tonal centers are elusive and ambiguous.

The music I devised for De La Mare’s poem is not so avant garde as to be meaningless, absurd. The chords are triadic. It’s just that the triads are distant from one another on the Circle of Fifths just as we are distant from those far away galaxies.

The stars have almost no meaning for us. They simply “are.” I tried to fashion music that would express how we feel, reacting to that stark truth.

What if you were setting [the verses above] to music? What melodies and harmonies would seem right to you?

Hopefully, you’ll find that the gentle weirdness of my music is apt for in a setting of this poem … perhaps even beautiful in a strange, other-worldly way, like the Webb telescope’s photos of distant galaxies.

It would be fun to hear the vocal part of this song played on a theremin.

To hear the rich, dark mezzo voice of Susan Olson singing “Wanderers,” from my cycle “Silvery Songs” for mezzo, flute and piano, click on the link above.

To see a PDF of the score, click on the link above.