Music Comments:
17'. Premiered by the University of Chicago Contemporary Chamber Players on April 21st, 1995, Stephen Mosko, conductor, Nelda Nelson, mezzo-soprano.
Text Comments:
translations:
I.
I keep watch over my mother in silence and compare her silence, inert, with my vigil: time breaks itself against the bone, her profile cannot sustain the destiny of air and light. Her body is fragile, but hard against time, time nourishes her, comforts her: the parallel life lived by he, who lives facing her dying, is a risk of another sort. I keep watch over my mother in silence, in silence of body and mind, inside the mind thoughts wander in search of a beginning and an end. Every death is a proclamation: prepare the necessary things: the name, the measurements of the body and the mind, the fabric of her story.
II.
In my mind thoughts wander of a beginning and an end: like a hand searching for the other hand. It is not a truth: her death confirms what exists from the beginning to the end. It is neither a truth nor a confirmation. No one believes: it is much too short this time for us to believe in anything else.
III.
I saw my mother naked shortly before her death: it was her body in the short time before being a corpse. Her fixed image reminded me of another body in my life and a brief struggle transforms the difference perhaps perceived in the one and the same figure of the mind.
IV.
A light of years that resembles the light of the day but is stronger by comparison: it is the eternal light of prayer and in the wish frees this light of today from death.
V.
Now, my mother dead, no one protects me from thinking of myself. "Into Thy hands..." her hands search between the covers. "To Paradise you are conducted by angels..." she said it laughingly at the labor of climbing the stairs, me supporting her, and she was almost young. But was she alive? I don't know when, now that distance has grown and clouds time, all the time of her life, to fix a time before death or close to it: all time has become a sign, a trace, only a very brief passage, an instant of life, an appearance.
VI.
"She is not of this earth" memory insists on this earth because she must not fall out of it, as if still surviving in life. But now I confess death.
VII.
It is a visitation from threshold to threshold before the distance grows until it does away with every trace of time and the void breaks open between the yesterdays of life and today, deserted and blind. "A wooden pillow", the meaningless request now acquires the sound of every truth. Between question and answer now is posed the distance of the void and this corresponds to another way of being. In the sweet alliance between the living and the dead lived the meaning of my life.
VIII.
My mother is dead, I am old. All at once the sense of age breaks off life and me inside of it. Like a wayfarer I continue on the road without the wall surrounding it. This strong wall was my mother and with this bastion I stood, alive, to look at the fields beyond it. Nature has gone, only the relentless sequence of steps, the sun is still, it no longer shows the time. Now already all has become brief: the light, the steps and my very body, and brief is time, and brief the distance between me and the end even if the duration of life is immense.
This entry contributed by John Eaton around 3/20/99. The contributor(s) composed the song.
Music Comments:
Marked "Slow, desolate, quarter = 60". Essentially in a tonally expanded B minor, this song is lyrical and challenging. Calls for a pianissimo B5, hangs quite high.
Text Comments:
This text is supposed to have been written by Keats to Fanny Brawne, a young neighbor with whom he fell deeply in love as he was dying in his mid-twenties of tuberculosis.
This living hand, now warm and capable Of earnest grasping, would, if it were cold And in the icy silence of the tomb, So haunt thy days and chill thy dreaming nights That thou wouldst wish thine own heart dry of blood So in my veins red life might stream again, And thou be conscience-calm'd--see here it is--I hold it towards you.
This entry contributed by G&K around 10/7/99. The contributor(s) looked over the song.
Music Comments:
A beautiful, moving song. Marked "slowly" quarter = 66. Top note (E5 in original key) must be very quiet (piano) and sustained in one section.
Text Comments:
Gather up, gather up In the arms of your pity The sick, the depraved, the desperate, the tired, All the scum of our weary city Gather up in the arms of your pity. Gather up In the arms of your love Those who expect No love from above.
This entry contributed by G&K around 5/15/99. The contributor(s) heard the song.
Music Comments:
optional E6 raises range. several subito tempo changes in this short song. A relatively spare accompaniment like many in the cycle.
Text Comments:
little man (in a hurry full of an important worry) halt stop forget relax wait (little child who have tried who have failed who have cried) lie bravely down sleep big rain big snow big sun (enter us)
This entry contributed by G&K around 4/6/99. The contributor(s) looked over the song.
Music Comments:
an ostinato in the right hand begins and ends this piece--Russell Platt calls it ". . . an effective symbol for nature's indifference to the poet's ruminations. . . ." broad motion in the voice as the piano speeds up and then returns to the drowsy feel of the beginning.
Text Comments:
Full text: A big bee thumps against my northern window this morning. I saw a man with an enormous belly mowing the lawn into stripes and packages. I heard their buzzing all day making sandwiches...What does the sun offer when it reappears after a whole day of grayness followed by dusk? How can you smile so sincerely? I just want to hear the sun's sweet sound. The droning, the grayness the long afternoon, nothing in the mail, and the querulous boy quarrels with his sister the next yard over who whacked the newspaper in the wrong direction before you walked in not making a sound.
Music Comments:
"With simple serenity" "dolce" quarter = 50-56. A short sweet motive graces the piano part twice and the vocal part twice. EbM feel. Not technically challenging except pp.
Text Comments:
"Live in simple faith" like a cherry blooms, fades, and falls.
This entry contributed by G&K around 10/15/98. The contributor(s) looked over the song.
Music Comments:
Almost entirely spoken in a rapid cockney inflected patter; a real
tour-de-force for a musically gifted comic actress. Duration: 3:24
Text Comments:
The first few lines: "This mornin' 'bout ten, Missus Birney come into the shop lookin' like a shark with a broom for a head, and she says most discreet but vicious like she is: 'Have you heard about Lady Spencer and that bore she met at Whitehall?' All the while tryin' on hats with her razor blade hands and I said 'No, I haven't,' and she said, Well, it's a disgrace and a threat to society and your employer Miss Daisy knows all about it, because she sold Lady Spencer that ridiculous frock with the plums and the buckles!' And I said, very civil like I am, 'I don't know anything about it.' " [more]
This entry contributed by Richard Pearson Thomas around 10/15/98. The contributor(s) composed the song.
