I was approached to set this poem by soprano and collaborator Arianna Arnold after her stunning performances as Gertrude Stein in multiple performances of MAY SHE | SHE MAY. While working on this text setting, the atmospheric, descriptive qualities of the poem led me to reconceive the project as a choral piece - with a dedication, soprano solo, and more music for Arianna as apology! It is a poem of pure mood, the kind of text whose non-narrative, static, symbolic, passionate stylings we see mirrored in the works and aesthetic goals of the French 19th  and 20th century artists who worshipped Poe: Debussy, (early) Ravel, Baudelaire, Mallarmé. It seems likely this formerly “silent dell” is not a real location, but an emotional, internal landscape of mourning, agitation, and desolation. Poe leads us around this emotional landscape, its geography, its climate, its history (vaguely). The poem wallows, deliciously so, in this panorama and my setting trails off into the distance, not quite ending, since the poem has been a snapshot, not a story. With the emphasis on rustling, on “airs that move,” I felt a chorus of ghostly voices would better create the haunted atmosphere of this mournful piece.

"The Valley of Unrest" (1831) by Edgar Allen Poe. This poem is in the public domain.

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Peter Dayton Music (ASCAP) for: $1/copy

While nationalism, tribalist patriotism, and military enthusiasm were potent forces in the nineteen-teens and twenties, British poet A. E. Housman was writing epigrammatic and melancholy poems about the cut-short lives of soldiers, about youth that descends into death, about unrequited or unspoken love, about swords that will not save. This poem, the second from Housman’s collection “Last Poems,” speaks from the point of view of a soldier preparing for war, thinking about the others who have taken part in war, both enemies and friends. The soldier thinks of these things with the cold comfort of girding himself with a weapon, a tool designed for killing. The poem simultaneously evokes the atavism and romanticism of war: thinking “on old ill fortunes / Of better men than I” is supposed to “make him brave,” even as he laments the fallen soldiers whose lives he will never know, or for whom he should not mourn because of the arbitrary lines that divide one side from another, as it seemed to those most disillusioned by the Great War. Like the poem, my musical setting is not optimistic. It aspires to air out the sadness and grief that is tightly coiled within the late Victorian rhyming quatrains of this short, lamenting poem.

Text, poem no. 2 “As I gird on for fighting…” by A. E. Housman from “Last Poems,” published in 1922. This poem is in the public domain.

A Name for All (2017)

Text by Hart Crane (1899-1932)

SATB Chorus

Total duration ca. 3'15 

Single-movement work

Midsummer is one setting in a series of choral settings of modern American poetry that examine transcendent themes through a secular lens. I have been composing since 2013, a collection I have entitled An American Mass. A poet of particular conceptual inventiveness, like Wallace Stevens, Bronk in this poem contrasts the painting-like tranquility of his ‘green world’ with some startling language and images: Someone looking into a mirror and seeing their own back, and Bronk’s desire preserve the serene moment’s immediacy with the same intensity “as much as if an atrocity had happened”. This unexpectedly dark line, an exhortation to remember the ‘green world’ serves only to heighten by contrast the joy of his pronouncement that “the earth is beautiful beyond all change.” The poem and the setting capture a moment of nearly-painful intensity, a suspended moment when beauty makes us yearn for immortality.

Text “Midsummer” by William Bronk. Text copyright The Trustees of Columbia University in the City of New York.

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Peter Dayton Music (ASCAP) for: $1/copy

Midsummer is featured on the Ablaze Records CD "New Choral Voices, Vol. 2" (AR-00040). Recorded by the Brett Scott & Coro Volante