Sun Songs (2004)
For solo soprano and three percussion
Texts by Emily Dickinson
First performance: The Percussion Plus Project, Chicago, Illinois, 26 February 2006
Duration: 10 minutes
Composing for voice is my first passion in life, and as a result the largest part of my catalogue is music for voice: solo voice, small groups of voices, small or large choirs, with and without orchestral or other kinds of accompaniments. For me, the human voice — possibly the most subtle, complex, and fragile yet forceful, flexible, seductive, and persuasive carrier of musical ideas and meanings — has always been an inspiration for and influence upon my entire musical thinking. I sing when I compose. I adore reading poems, and cherish the opportunity to set them to music; and I believe that text plus music (1+1) must equal at least 24. If 1+1=2, there is no need, for me, to set the text to music. Emily Dickinson's poems are intensely personal, intellectual, introspective, and offer a meditation on life, death, and poetic creation; her poems share a close observation of nature as well as consideration of religious and philosophical issues.
If there's one thing Emily Dickinson knew for sure, it was what a good poem should do. "If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry," she wrote. Dickinson was attempting to describe for her sister-in-law the power of poetry to envelop and even to devastate the reader (or listener). Her physical description was an effort to convey that successful poems are not weakling, tiny delightful breezes or passages or bookish exercises; they are chillingly annihilating.
Poems have the power to alter us irrevocably.
Poetry, the Belle of Amherst knew, is that form of communication in which words are never simple equivalents of experience or perception. The words themselves, the words as words, have a life as sounds, as images, as the means for generating a series of associations, and as such are very inspiring to me. As a composer, I am interested in the simultaneous life of language as symbol and as nonreferential but it is poets who most seem to insist on seeing and hearing words as if each is a multi-faceted gem that has, in the hands of the skillful artist, the capacity to resonate and to go in multiple directions at once.
Sun Songs for soprano and 3 percussion was commissioned by DePauw University School of Music. Amy Barber and her colleagues presented the world premiere performance on 26 February, 2006. The four songs, all setting poems about the sun of Emily Dickinson, are colorful, varied, and last 10 minutes.
Augusta Read Thomas
TEXTS
999
Superfluous were the Sun
When Excellence be dead
He were superfluous every Day
For every Day be said
That syllable whose Faith
Just saves it from Despair
And whose "I'll meet You" hesitates
If Love inquire "Where"?
Upon His dateless Fame
Our Periods may lie
As Stars that drop anonymous
From an abundant sky.
1178
My God — He sees thee —
Shine thy best —
Fling up thy Balls of Gold
Till every Cubit play with thee
And every Crescent hold —
Elate the Acre at his feet —
Upon his Atom swim —
Oh Sun — but just a Second's right
In thy long Race with him!
591
To interrupt His Yellow Plan
The Sun does not allow
Caprices of the Atmosphere —
And even when the Snow
Heaves Balls of Specks, like Vicious Boy
Directly in His Eye —
Does not so much as turn His Head
Busy with Majesty —
'Tis His to stimulate the Earth —
And magnetize the Sea —
And bind Astronomy, in place,
Yet Any passing by
Would deem Ourselves — the busier
As the Minutest Bee
That rides — emits a Thunder —
A Bomb — to justify —
1023
It rises — passes — on our South
Inscribes a simple Noon —
Cajoles a Moment with the Spires
And infinite is gone —
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