Bowles and Schuyler’s performance piece A Picnic Cantata: for Four Women’s Voices, Two Pianos, and Percussion (1954) is delightfully silly. It’s about a happy picnic that is intentionally nonsensical. The music by Bowles’ and the libretto by Schuyler capture the superficiality and simplicity of picnics without deep meaning. If there is a plot, it concerns a picnic at Hat Hill Park, but whether it is accurate or imagined is unknown and of no consequence. The narrative follows the usual picnic scenario: a visit from friends who propose a Sunday drive and picnic; planning the picnic; the drive to Hat Hill park; reading of the Sunday paper horoscope, advice column, and garden section; and at last packing up and returning home.
Bowles and Schuyler gleefully attack the picnicking tradition, taking their cue from Gertrude Stein and Absurdism. They depict motoring to the country as a playful series of discontinuities, ambiguities, alliterations, and repetitions meant to be picnicky and quirky:
Knock, knock,
Who’s there?
Open the door.
Open the door who?
Open the door and see.
Good morning, dear,
good morning you,
we thought it might be nice
if you and she
came with me
and we went Sunday driving.
We could make a lunch
and eat a picnic
outside in the sun.
A spring picnic
what a lovely idea
the day is ideal.
What shall we take?
All kinds of things
that is nice to eat.
In the picnic basket I want to find
a roll of lemon rind,
steak and chips, a T-bone fish,
Milady’s blintzes with white wine sauce
and a pound of Child’s creaorganized [sic] chocolates.
Four washable plates
and four forks
and lots of napkins.
Napkins are the best part of a picnic.
We can’t go on a picnic
without ketchup and a car.
Have you a car?
You are in my car.
So we are.
The Columbia Records album cover for A Picnic Cantata (1955) shows the cast on the way to the picnic seated in a charabanc: Bowles in front, musicians, singers, and Schuyler in the last seat.
Featured Image: LP Cover Art. Arthur Gold and Robert Fizdale. Paul Bowles: A Picnic Cantata for Two Pianos (1953). ML 5068. New York: Columbia, 1955; reissued Naxos, 2011.
See James Schuyler. “A Picnic Cantata.” In Collected Poems of James Schuyler. New York Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1953. “A Picnic Cantata” was initially published in The Home Book 1951-1970 (New York: 1977), edited by Trevor Winkfield. New York Inland Women source/Z Press