Schubert in the Stevenson

Has it only been six months since normal professional musical life has been put on hold? It feels like it has been far longer. Every covid day seems, in some ways, to be equal to a week. So much seems to happen so quickly when our communication happens in virtual time rather than in real time, yet as far as music is concerned, there is no way to really measure much of anything.

I believe I have been using my time well, but chain-writing was not the way I expected to be spending this year. Here's the music I have written and arranged since March:

Scarborough Fair for solo viola (March 17, 2020) 

Saprophyte I (String Quartet) March 18, 2020 

Transcription for quartet (string, viola, clarinet) of J.S. Bach's Adagio BWV 1018 

Transcription of the last movement of Tchaikovsky's Sixth Symphony for String Sextet (March 29, 2020) 

Birthday Piece Number 12 (Viola d’amore and piano) April 17, 2020 

Eleven Miniature Studies for Violin Solo (solo violin) May 2, 2020 

Quo Vadis for Euphonium and Woodwind Quintet (May 17, 2020) (forthcoming video premiere) 

A Tunes: Capricious Pieces for Beginner Violinists (May 24, 2020) (forthcoming in 2021 from Mel Bay) 

Impressions (voice and piano) June 11, 2021 

The Gift of the Condor (chamber orchestra, narrator, kid violinist) June 23, 2020 (forthcoming video premiere, forthcoming publication) 

Ladder of Escape for Four Bassoons (bassoon quartet) July 26, 2020 

Two Places in Illinois (piano solo) August 14, 2020 (forthcoming video premiere and concert premiere in 2021) 

Transcription of Robert Schumann's "Kinderscenen" for violin and cello (September 18, 2020) 

Tzadik Katamar (Louis Lewandowski) arrangement for two violas or two violins (September 20, 2020)

In an Old House in Paris (modular duet) September 26, 2020 

Two Fragments of Fragments from Jubilate (two voices) September 30, 2020 

Ferdinand (solo viola or solo cello) October 4, 2020 

Ferdinand II (solo euphonium or solo cello) October 8, 2020 

A Cellist’s Garden of Verses (solo cello, with versions for solo violin, solo viola and solo bass) October 14, 2020

Today I finished a set of six pieces for novice cellists (or violinists, or violists, or bassists), and that set is the reason for the title of this post.

I have always loved Robert Louis Stevenson's A Child's Garden of Verses. It was my introduction to poetry. While going through the larger work (and it is a large collection of poems) I encountered poems that were not in my illustrated childhood anthology. The music in "Windy Nights" particularly caught my ear as being a little like Schubert's Erlkönig:

Whenever the moon and stars are set,
Whenever the wind is high,
All night long in the dark and wet,
A man goes riding by.
Late in the night when the fires are out,
Why does he gallop and gallop about?
Whenever the trees are crying aloud,
And ships are tossed at sea,
By, on the highway, low and loud,
By at the gallop goes he.
By at the gallop he goes, and then
By he comes back at the gallop again.

and "Singing" seems to have "Der Leierman" from Schubert's Wintereise as a counterpoint to its phrases.

Of speckled eggs the birdie sings
And nests among the trees;
The sailor sings of ropes and things
In ships upon the seas.
The children sing in far Japan,
The children sing in Spain;
The organ with the organ man
Is singing in the rain.

UPDATE: While looking through more poems by Stevenson (including his Songs of Travel) for the next project in my chain, I found that he subtitled "The Vagabond" "To an air of Schubert." The hard part for me about doing any setting of poems from the Songs of Travel is trying not to hear the Vaughan Williams in them!