
Fresh In The Triumph (2018)
High Voice and Piano
Text by Peter Dayton
Total duration ca. 4'30
Single-movement work
Premiered in April 2018
in Raleigh, NC by Peter Dayton and Jeremy Roberts
Watch a performance of this work on YouTube
Video performance, February 22, 2020 in Baltimore, MD
Peter Dayton, Tenor
Aaron Thacker, Piano
Purchase this score from
Peter Dayton Music (ASCAP) for: $15
This song was a labor of love - commissioned by the husband of a dear friend of mine for that friend's birthday, Fresh In The Triumph is a song inspired by Virginia Woolf's "Mrs. Dalloway," my friends favorite book. A refrain throughout the book is a section from a song in Shakespeare's "Cymbeline":
Fear no more the heat o’ the sun,
Nor the furious winter’s rages;
Thou thy worldly task hast done,
Home art gone, and ta’en thy wages:
Golden lads and girls all must,
As chimney-sweepers, come to dust."
It is a funereal song that suggests that the dead fear nothing, that death is a release from care, toil and fear. Against that fatalistic notion (and more appropriately celebratory for a birthday), Fresh In The Triumph emphasizes the transcendent quality that our passing moments take on, and how we survive in those instants of forever. A book whose varies strains and ruminations on existence, memory, and time culminate in a party, the song takes elements of the characters and reflections of Clarissa and Peter Walsh and combines them into a new celebration of those themes in a style inspired by the folk-rock musical style of Jason Robert Brown.