I want the full hyphen: folk-rock-country-jazz-classical, so finally when you get all the hyphens in, maybe they’ll drop them all, and get down to just some American music.
-Joni Mitchell

Although she is clearly a child of the great American popular tradition, there is no more serious artist on the contemporary scene than the composer-poet, Joni Mitchell. Her work, like that of Duke Ellington and Stevie Wonder, transcends the limits imposed by the terms “popular” and “serious.” Furthermore, her music-poetry is a remarkable example of the ever-present potential of ancient unity.

In Mitchell’s music, sophistication of melodic design, intertwined with word, rhythm, harmony, meaning, idea, tension, and release, function at the highest level of creativity. With the appearance of her first album, Joni Mitchell (1967), her impact was immediate. This was music hard to categorize: “popular,” yes; “folk,” yes; but it was more: There was a lean and haunting classicism in these songs. The melodies-graceful, elegant, strikingly original-were sung to gentle, carefully controlled guitar accompaniments, whose integrated role in the final result were not unlike the “simple” genius of the piano accompaniments to Schubert’s songs (Lied der Mignon, for example). All of this finely wrought musical craft supported dreamlike, romantic poems, almost childlike in their innocence. It was as if some ancient Anglo-Celtic singer in a modern guise had appeared on the twentieth-century American scene.

The innocence would not last. The remarkable and profound stylistic changes that Joni Mitchell has gone through are, in a real and poetic sense, a reliving of the journey of Western culture from the idealism of the classical-romantic tradition into the “darkness of our Modern age”. Joni Mitchell, whose original artistic vision rested squarely within that classic idealism found, as others have, a totally new energy in the Modern age that has nothing to do with either classicism or romanticism. Many poets, painters, writers, and composers have expressed a sense of alienation and discontinuity with an idealized past, while at the same time longing for it.

From Song to a Seagull to Hejira
Joni Mitchell’s first album Song to a Seagull was evidence of a musical style still connected to classical ideals of beauty. But even in this “perfect” musical-poetic world, the road to a more “dangerous” realm was hinted at in songs like the title track Song to a Seagull. Romanticism lay the groundwork for the image of a personal quest for the infinite-the abandonment of restraints in order that the truth of the world might be known and captured in life and art. What happens when you pursue that idealized quest across the modern landscape? That is just what Joni Mitchell does later in her career with her album Hejira.

The drone of flying engines
Is a song so wild and blue
It scrambles time and seasons if it gets through to you
Then your life becomes a travelogue
Of picture-postcard-charms
Amelia, it was just a false alarm

-from the song Amelia, in the Hejira album

No simple description can do justice to a multilayered work of art. All we can do is to hint briefly at the richness of the music through two of the central pieces in the cycle, Amelia and Hejira (the title song). Amelia refers to none other than Amelia Earhart, the famous pilot-explorer who died in 1937. In the song-poem, she and Joni merge in a surrealist, mythical vision of flight. The music creates a hypnotic, “floating” background that never reaches home. At first listening, it seems to have a key center, until you try to sing it. Then you realize that she, in fact, moves it back and forth between two keys without ever settling into one. The effect of this harmonic design, coupled with the slow, gently swaying rhythms, seem to “open up into the sky.” Superimposed upon the basic structure are whining, “cool,” electric sounds, often dissonant, that haunt the musical background. The musical elements support a carefully balanced poetical structure. In each verse of six lines, the harmonic and rhythmic tension reach a maximum level in the third line, which causes the following three lines to come gently tumbling out in perfect acoustic symmetry.

A ghost of aviation
She was swallowed by the sky
Or by the sea, like me she had a dream to fly
Like Icarus ascending
On beautiful foolish arms
Amelia, it was just a false alarm
(fifth verse)

For the willing listener, Amelia evokes a totally contemporary experience of time, prompted and shaped by flight over the vast expanse of the modern world – a source of both confusion and revelation. This journey is clearly symbolic of Joni Mitchell’s personal journey. Just as the harmony never comes home, neither does the song offer any resolution other than the refrain: “Amelia, it was just a false alarm.”

The title song, Hejira, is certainly one of the Mitchell’s greatest song-poems. The music is subdued, cool. As Schubert might have suggested a brook running through the Viennese countryside in a piano accompaniment, the background of Hejira suggests the whirring of the modern age. Within this nonidealized musical environment, we are moved from the petty to the universal and back again.

It is difficult to categorize the musical style of Hejira. All of Joni’s previous explorations come together in a unified stylistic fabric. Joni Mitchell, like our age, is stylistically restless. As evidence, her next adventure was a collaboration with the great jazz artist, Charles Mingus (Mingus, 1979), an exploration into jazz that represented an entirely new direction for the artist.

“I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,
dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix,
angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night, who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed high sat up smoking in the supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz”
- excerpt from “HOWL”

Allen Ginsberg, the visionary poet and founding father of the Beat generation inspired the American counterculture of the second half of the 20th century with groundbreaking poems such as “Howl” and “Kaddish.” Among the avant-garde he was considered a spiritual and sexually liberated ambassador for tolerance and enlightenment. With an energetic and loving personality, Ginsberg used poetry for both personal expression and in his fight for a more interesting and open society.

Allen Ginsberg was born in Newark, New Jersey on June 3, 1926. As a boy he was a close witness to his mother’s mental illness, as she lived both in and out of institutions. His father, Louis Ginsberg was a well-known traditional poet. After graduating from high school, Ginsberg attended Columbia University, where he planned to study law. There he became friends with Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs. Together the three would change the face of American writing forever.
Ginsberg

With an interest in the street life of the city, Kerouac, Ginsberg and Burroughs found inspiration in jazz music and the culture that surrounded it. They encouraged a break from traditional values, supporting drug-use as a means of enlightenment. To many, their shabby dress and “hip” language seemed irresponsible, but in their actions could be found the seeds of a revolution that was meant to cast off the shackles of the calm and boring social life of the post-war era. While a nation tried desperately to keep from rocking the boat, Allen Ginsberg and the Beats saw the need for a more vibrant and daring society.

One of the primary first works of the Beats was Ginsberg’s long poem “Howl.” In an age plagued by intolerance, “Howl” (1956) was both a desperate plea for humanity and a song of liberation from that intolerant society. Ginsberg’s use of a gritty vernacular and an improvisational rhythmical style created a poetry which seemed haphazard and amateur to many of the traditional poets of the time. In “Howl” and his other poems, however, one could hear a true voice of the time, unencumbered by what the Beats saw as outdated forms and meaningless grammatical rules.

For its frank embrace of such taboo topics as homosexuality and drug use, “Howl” drew a great deal of criticism. Published by City Lights, the San Francisco based publisher of many of the Beats, the book was the subject of an obscenity trial. Eventually acquitted of the charges, City Lights came out with Ginsberg’s second book in 1961. “Kaddish, And Other Poems,” often considered Ginsberg’s greatest work, dealt again with a deep despair and addressed Ginsberg’s closeness with his mother while she was hospitalized and fighting insanity. The raw nature of the subject matter and Ginsberg’s desperate emotions found a perfect home in his poem “Kaddish.” Of “Kaddish,” Ginsberg wrote “I saw my self my own mother and my very nation trapped desolate…and receiving decades of life while chanting Kaddish the names of Death in many mind-worlds the self seeking key to life found at last our self.”

Throughout the 1960s, Ginsberg experimented with a number of different drugs, believing that under the influence he could create a new kind of poetry. Using LSD, peyote, marijuana and other drugs he attempted to expand his consciousness and wrote a number of books under the influence including the “Yage Letters” with William Burroughs. For much of the youth of the day, Ginsberg’s embrace of illegal drugs and unrestrained sexuality made him a central figure in the rebelling movements of the time. More than any other American poet of the 20th century, Ginsberg used his popularity for social change. Coining the phrase “flower power,” Ginsberg encouraged protesters of the 1960s to embrace a non-violent rebellion. By the 1970s, his fame had grown enormously, and though he cast aside drug use for an interest in Buddhism and yogic practices, he remained important to newly-formed youth movements.

By the 1980s, Ginsberg was the most famous living American poet. As a writer he continued to publish challenging and personal verse and as a celebrity he maintained an international presence as a spokesperson for peace and tolerance—working often as a teacher and lecturer . In the last decade of his life, Ginsberg wrote and performed at the prolific rate of his youth. He had sold millions of books and had often expanded into other genres. Among the collaborators of his final years were members of the bands Sonic Youth and U2. He died on April 5, 1997 at the age of seventy. At the time of his death, “Howl” had been reprinted more than fifty times, and the words of William Carlos Williams’ introduction still rang true—”This poet sees through and all around the horrors he partakes of in the very intimate details of his poem. He avoids nothing but experiences it to the hilt. He contains it. Claims it as his own—and, we believe, laughs at it and has the time and affrontery to love a fellow of his choice and record that love in a well-made poem.”