It’s non­sen­si­cal that those who claim to be defend­ing mar­riage, which of course is not even under attack, seek to do so by lim­it­ing the num­ber and kind of peo­ple who may join in it. They would pre­fer mar­riage to be like a coun­try club, and limit admit­tance from the wrong kind of peo­ple. Their idea of love was described by Walt Whit­man as:

Behold love choked, cor­rect, polite, always suspicious

Behold the received mod­els of the parlors -

To which the poet imme­di­ately responds:

What are they to me?

What to these young men that travel with me?

In 1977, Leonard Bern­stein set those lines and the entire poem to music, writ­ing what is one of the great art songs in the canon of West­ern clas­si­cal music. Tues­day night at Merkin Hall, The New York Fes­ti­val of Song and orga­nizer and accom­pa­nist Steven Blier pre­sented this song as part of the first of two nights of Man­ning the Canon, Songs of Gay Life. It’s a pro­gram with, yes, an agenda, one that it wears upfront and so lightly that the need for argu­ment is dis­pensed, and the music does the talk­ing. Blier and his singers are not respon­si­ble for hav­ing to respond to the ques­tion of whether or not gays belong in soci­ety, but they have given the best answer; rather than argu­ing the point, they merely show that gays have always belonged in soci­ety, and the answer comes in song.

Great songs, and great singing. The pro­gram cov­ered 200 years in time and cabaret, Broad­way and art songs, start­ing with “Purest Kind of a Guy” from Marc Blitzstein’s show No For an Answer (and pop­u­lar­ized by Paul Robe­son) to “You’re The Top!” — with­out Patri­cia Barber’s, um, vari­a­tions. In between were songs were songs explic­itly about being gay, Steven Lutvak’s “Exit Right,” songs about a love choked by soci­ety from Tchaikovsky and Charles Griffes, an echt-cheeky and per­fectly appro­pri­ate take on Cy Coleman’s “Ten­nis Duet” from City of Angels, a mar­velous song by Poulenc, “Mont­par­nasse,” with a poem by Apol­li­naire about dis­cov­er­ing the true nature of per­sonal desire, a excel­lent set­ting of Frank O’Hara’s “Song (It Is Dirty),” by Christo­pher Berg, and the late Chris De Blasio’s mar­velous and mov­ing “Walt Whit­man in 1989,” from a poem by Perry Brass. There was not a weak link in all this widely var­ied mate­r­ial, it was an excep­tion­ally well-chosen pro­gram enhanced by Blier’s wise and funny inter­sti­tial com­ments and his sen­si­tive accompaniment.

And the singing was fab­u­lous, all of the men — tenor Scott Mur­phree, bari­tones Jesse Blum­berg and Matthew Worth and bass Matt Boehler — not just excel­lent vocal­ists but excel­lent per­form­ers as well, giv­ing each song the right amount and type of char­ac­ter, whether that meant sub­lime beauty in an ensem­ble arrange­ment of Schubert’s “Der Gondelfahrer” or the exactly right kind of over-acting in “The Piano Walk/I’ll Be By,” an excerpt from William Bolcom’s Casino Par­adise. Boehler dom­i­nated the evening, in a gen­er­ous way, with his nat­ural, com­fort­able charisma and his great instru­ment, both full and with the kind of edge to his tim­bre that is an excep­tional qual­ity in a bass voice. From start to fin­ish this was one of the most purely plea­sur­able con­certs in recent mem­ory, the music-making the argu­ment itself. No eth­i­cal, moral per­son can say no to love, and the effect of the event was to spread a mature, know­ing, joy­ful love through the audi­ence. This was beauty as an expres­sion of human feel­ing, with­out received mod­els or man­ners. In terms of judg­ing the qual­ity of music, and art, it’s eas­ier to be dis­tracted by attempts at pro­fun­dity and high con­cept, when the sim­ple mak­ing of music as well and as beau­ti­fully as one can is the fun­da­men­tal goal. The first night of Man­ning the Canon was as beau­ti­ful as great music, and great art, can be. [There are fur­ther install­ments of the fes­ti­val in Feb­ru­ary and March].

“Every­body loves being sung to.” Blier must state the obvi­ous, unfor­tu­nately. Those politi­cians and reli­gious fig­ures who speak loudly about mar­riage being the foun­da­tion of civ­i­liza­tion (here’s a par­tic­u­larly good exam­ple of such a ten­den­tious idiot), see the insti­tu­tion as an abstract right or ideal, rather than a con­crete process, and their notion of civ­i­liza­tion is the legacy of their ridicu­lous, shal­low pro­pa­ganda, bound between hard­cov­ers. Civ­i­liza­tion is peo­ple com­ing together in one fairly sta­tic place to develop ways of think­ing and being together, to specif­i­cally develop ways of liv­ing that become abstract val­ues that bind peo­ple together in mutual choices. Civ­i­liza­tion is founded on singing.

Before peo­ple could decide what they could do together, they came together to make music and to hear sto­ries, sto­ries that were sung. Homer was a singer, what we now call his poetry was a sung epic. And the form did not orig­i­nate with him, nor only in the Balkans. Singing is the first music, and music is the thing we do together that is the first thing that is abstract and cre­ated out of the imag­i­na­tion of the body and the mind. So let’s defend singing, in all its variety.

That truly amaz­ing vari­ety was on dis­play at the Vital Vox 2010 fes­ti­val, held at the Issue Project Room. In the two (out of a total of three) nights I attended I saw a daz­zling range of singing. At the most famil­iar end was Corey Dargel’s pre­miere of a group of songs, Hold Your­self Together, accom­pa­nied by WIll Smith and James Moore. Dargel’s phrases and the range of his accom­pa­ni­ments keep slow­ing extend­ing and expand­ing, to good effect. The music is at times blippy, at times crunchy, with some baroque fil­li­gree in “Your Pro­found Self-Doubt,” while Dargel croons out jaun­diced but still opti­mistic lyrics. His songs are about the mis­com­mu­ni­ca­tions of mod­ern life, both inad­ver­tent and delib­er­ately used by cou­ples to mis­un­der­stand each other. Ulti­mately, and with a sweet and almost regret­ful ten­der­ness, they accept and embrace love, pos­si­bly and actu­ally. Nat Bald­win sang about love too, accom­pa­ny­ing him­self on bass. He ended his charm­ing set with a cover of Arthur Russell’s “A Lit­tle Lost,” and his own mate­r­ial was eccen­tric and sub­tly com­plex, a long impro­vi­sa­tion on the bass open­ing up an intrigu­ing abstract side to the music. A fine bal­ance of the com­mon­place and the avant-garde.

A man’s gotta make a living …

There was a lot of vocal impro­vi­sa­tion, some excel­lent, some prob­lem­atic. Samita Sinha’s Cipher was just that. She sang snatches of impro­vi­sa­tion in the style of tarana , and sang well, but her music was dis­or­ga­nized. She aban­doned ideas with­out build­ing them up, stopped singing alto­gether at times to fid­dle with rather dull beats from a vari­ety of elec­tronic boxes, with no appar­ent rea­son or pur­pose, and inter­po­lated “Oh Death” into her per­for­mance in a way that was pre­ten­tious and irri­tat­ing. Her best mate­r­ial, loop­ing her voice and singing against it, came at the end, and by that time the per­for­mance had gone on, badly, for too long. Fes­ti­val orga­nizer Sab­rina Last­man pre­miered a piece called River of Painted Birds, which she sang accom­pa­nied by elec­tron­ics, some video and some drum­ming from David Still­man. The sound was rich, evoca­tive and fre­quently lovely, with Last­man singing with mel­liflu­ous phras­ing, but not all the elec­tronic mate­r­ial worked — a sec­tion with pre­re­corded speak­ing voices seemed to belong to another piece. Her impro­vis­ing was fine, but she fell into the trap of reach­ing a nat­ural end­ing, then con­tin­u­ing, deflat­ing the power of the piece. With a touch of restruc­tur­ing this could be a pow­er­house work.

The great Joan La Bar­bara was on hand to offer part of an opera in progress (i had already seen a part for ensem­ble in the spring). Gate­keeper fea­tured her word­less, solo singing with elec­tronic back­ing. Her idea is to pro­vide some insight into the artist’s strug­gle to cre­ate, and her con­cen­trated, evoca­tive per­for­mance explored the inde­scrib­able inter­nal sen­sa­tion of the mind at work, wrestling both with itself and to artic­u­late thoughts in a way that can be com­mu­ni­cated. She effec­tively con­veyed the oddly pleas­ing frus­tra­tion of hav­ing to say some­thing and not know­ing how, except per­haps by singing. Jen Shyu, so strik­ing on Steve Coleman’s new CD, sang and played per­cus­sion, lute, piano and other instru­ments, and sang Tai­wanese folk music, orig­i­nal songs that idiomat­i­cally fit with the folk music, and impro­vised seam­lessly. She is quite a singer, with a great sound, pitch and breath sup­port, and her set was mes­mer­iz­ing, rit­u­al­is­tic and melan­choly. Her own mate­r­ial had her, at times, singing tonally while accom­pa­ny­ing her­self aton­ally, and beyond the impres­sive tech­nique it was excit­ing in the unnerv­ing way that Schoen­berg intended but could not quite achieve.

The out­liers even in this extended group were C. Spencer Yeh (a/k/a Burn­ing Star Core) and Chris Mann. Yeh did not sing in a strict sense, but he vocal­ized with every part of his neck and head that could pro­duce sound. Click­ing, gur­gling, inhal­ing and exhal­ing, rub­bing his cheeks against the micro­phone, even pour­ing water into his mouth, he pro­duced a series of dis­tinct sounds at an intense pace. Past the nov­elty, after only a lit­tle time it was appar­ent that he was build­ing phrases, then repeat­ing them, putting sec­tions together into larger scale impro­vi­sa­tions. As unusual as the sound mate­r­ial was, and it clearly was unset­tling to much of the audi­ence, his musi­cal sense was fun­da­men­tally sim­ple and, like an exper­i­men­tal ver­sion of Spike Jones, he made music with sounds set in time and space, not just notes on lined paper. It was impres­sive, most of all his sense of know­ing exactly when the music he was cre­at­ing came to an end. What Mann does is even more extreme and still per­haps the most tra­di­tional, archaic type of art. He per­formed his Art of the Diff a piece I saw him do two months ear­lier at a tribute to Ken­neth Gaburo. Mann per­forms by sit­ting in front of his audi­ence and giv­ing a mono­logue, and in con­tent, style and dra­matic tech­nique, the mono­logue comes off as an argu­ment, with him­self, about the nature of art and cre­ativ­ity. It comes out in mer­cu­r­ial, rapid fire sen­tence frag­ments, as he essen­tially inter­rupts him­self or, seem­ingly, looses his train of thought. Since the pre­vi­ous per­for­mance, the piece seems more lived in and assured, which makes for a feel­ing of light­ness and greater veloc­ity even as the over­all pace has slowed down and cre­ated more of a reg­u­lar pulse. The work is quiet, and Mann is sen­si­tive to exter­nal stim­uli, which in this case meant the sound of some­one prac­tic­ing the piano from another part of the build­ing, and two peo­ple who weren’t hip to the scene and left. He ends it by say­ing, with a smile, “any ques­tions?” It is unusual, opaque, fas­ci­nat­ing, but per­haps the best way to think about it is that Mann is doing what Homer did, he’s telling a story, how­ever dif­fer­ent in con­tent and form. He’s singing.