Fresh In The Triumph (2018)

High Voice and Piano

Text by Peter Dayton

Total duration ca. 4'30

Single-movement work

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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

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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.