"Canción de Jinete" performed by Rebecca Johnson and Cara Chowning

This piece for flute and piano is based on a song I wrote for countertenor and piano to a poem by Lorca. Here is an English translation by Michael Leddy of the poem.



I. Rider’s Song (Canción de Jinete)

Córdoba.
A long way alone.

Black pony, big moon,
and olives in my pack.
Though I know the way
I’ll never reach Córdoba.

Across the plain, through the wind,
black pony, red moon.
Death is watching me
from the towers of Córdoba.

Ah what a long way!
Ah my brave pony!
Oh that death waits for me
Before I reach Córdoba.

Córdoba.
A long way alone.

Shaking my head

The person who holds the position with the greatest power in the world is unable to address the issue of gun control as a possibility for preventing mass shootings like the one today in Pittsburgh because of his allegiance to the NRA. He has the audacity to blame victims for not being armed, claiming that the outcome would have been far "better" (who uses the word "better" in this situation?) if they had.

It has become clear to me that the greatest power in the world now lies with the people who run the National Rifle Association.

I imagine that leaders of other countries that engage in despicable activity are laughing at the person I don't want to name (I don't want it to appear in this blog). They are laughing at his incompetence and inability to provide moral leadership. They are also laughing at us, the citizens of the United States, because people in our country (and in our Congress) continue to support him.

November 6 can't come soon enough for me. I already voted, using a paper ballot.

In light we see, in light we are seen

This is the next installment of a video project with flutist Rebecca Johnson and pianist Cara Chowning.



This piece is a musical commentary on a memorial reading from the New Union Prayer Book:

In light we see; in light we are seen. The flames dance and our lives are full. But as night follows day, the candle of our life burns down and gutters. There is an end to the flames. We see no more and are no more seen. Yet we do not despair, for we are more than a memory slowly fading into the darkness. With our lives we give life. Something of us can never die: we move in the eternal cycle of darkness and death, of light and life.

Two performances tomorrow!

I'm looking forward to playing "Evening Music" for a meeting of the Tuesday Morning Music Club tomorrow morning, in Urbana, Illinois, and then I am looking forward to listening to a performance of "The Collar" in the evening. The (enchanted) evening concert, which is just south of Urbana in Savoy, Illinois, is private, but the poster is lovely, so I'm sharing it here.

The Illusion of Social Media

I feel nostalgic for the musical communities that this format of blogging made possible during its first decade, and I remember how much I enjoyed participating in long and interesting discussions on other blog posts in the musical blogosphere. Everything changed once Google Reader stopped making a lively blogosphere possible.

I was an early participant (I began in 2005), and I am one of the few musical bloggers from those days who posts with any regularity. Musicians seem to have moved their musical lives to Facebook, where they can find groups of people with specific musical interests and people from their musical pasts (and other pasts) to interact with. I use Facebook as well, and sometimes I put links to posts from this blog and my Thematic Catalog blog there. Those posts are read by a relative handful of people, and "liked" by many who scroll by without reading.

That is the way Facebook has "trained" us to engage. Scroll. Like. Move on. Scroll. Like. Move on. Comment. Move on. Feel disconnected. Try again. Try again later. Feel hopeful that someone will engage. Move on. Feel foolish. Feel disconnected. Rinse and repeat.

One thing that Facebook seems to do is to make some posts available to a lot of people who "like" them. One recent post I made from a moving car got "liked" by seventy people:



It was an iPhone picture with very little in the way of text. It took very little in the way of thought, and even less in the way of effort to post. Other posts I have made on Facebook, particularly posts I have made in musically oriented forums that have links to this blog or to my Thematic Catalog blog, seem to only be seen by a handful of people.

Oddly, except for birthday notices, I see very few of the posts that my Facebook friends make in my Facebook feed. It seems, in a way, that Facebook has narrowed my online social world, and it has turned social interaction into something more like window shopping.

Scroll. Like. Move on. Scroll. Like. Move on. Comment. Move on. Feel disconnected. Try again. Try again later. Feel hopeful that someone will engage. Move on. Feel foolish. Feel disconnected. Rinse and repeat.

There are "pages" on Facebook, and these seem to be offered for free. I "host" a few of these pages. There's one for my Thematic Catalog, there's one for Summer Strings, and there's one for Downstate Strings (my string quartet). I regularly get "suggestions" from Facebook that if I were to pay a small amount of money, those pages and the posts I put on them could be seen by a lot of people. It is the same with "events." If I want people to know about a free concert I am giving, I guess can pay money for my notice to go to Facebook feeds.

I wonder if by not paying into the "service" I am limiting my ability to communicate through Facebook. I have nothing to gain monetarily through my participation in this kind of Facebook world, so I don't feel that I should throw money at the problem of not feeling engaged. Making more Facebook posts doesn't help me feel more socially engaged, except on birthdays. A Facebook birthday is something extraordinary.

Scroll. Like. Move on. Scroll. Like. Move on. Comment. Move on. Feel disconnected. Try again. Try again later. Feel hopeful that someone will engage. Move on. Feel foolish. Feel disconnected. Rinse and repeat.

I think that the problem is our social interactions are being streamlined and directed by the automatons that regulate the Facebook "highway." Some of us choose to no longer engage in the social ways of Facebook. But in a post-Facebook world it is difficult to find a sense of community anywhere, even in our own physical communities. Facebook is either where the "audience" is, or we are given the illusion that Facebook is where the audience is.

Now I will wax nostalgic. When we first arrived at our little university town in the mid 1980s, there was a newspaper that reported on much of what went on in town. There was an insert in the paper that listed all the concerts that were being given at the university, and there were articles promoting events. We used to write letters to the editor. Our kids used to write letters to the editor. Local people used to write columns. The paper was a big deal. The paper felt like a vital organ in our community until the early 2000s.

Now our local paper is owned by a conglomerate, and aside from the obituaries, there is very little of local interest. We stopped subscribing because there is nothing worth reading. The (no longer) local paper does host a Facebook page, but it does very little in the way of creating a feeling of community for our town.

I try to get out. I participate in the local university orchestra in order to try connect with people in my community. I play in a local Renaissance ensemble. In the summer I get to connect with people through Summer Strings. I go to political forums, to funerals, and to concerts. And I go to the grocery store, which sometimes provides for a meaningful social interaction.

Scroll. Like. Move on. Scroll. Like. Move on. Comment. Move on. Feel disconnected. Try again. Try again later. Feel hopeful that someone will engage. Move on. Feel foolish. Feel disconnected. Rinse and repeat.

"For Poulenc" played by Rebecca Johnson and Cara Chowning

This is the first installment in a video project:



The music, written by me, is published by Seesaw and is available from Subito.

I originally wrote the piece as a setting of Frank O'Hara's poem "For Poulenc," and then re-worked it as a piece for flute and piano.

Here is the poem:

My first day in Paris I walked
from Saint Germain to the Point Mirabeau
in soft amber light and leaves
and love was running out

city of light and hearts
city of dusk and dismay
the Seine believed it to be true
that I was unloved and alone

how lonely is that bridge
without your song
the Avenue Mozart, the rue Pergolèse
the tobaccos and the nuns

all Paris is alone for this
brief leafless moment
and snow falls down upon
the streets of our peculiar hearts

Speak, Vladimir!

From Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita:

I have often noticed that we are inclined to endow our friends with the stability of type that literary characters acquire in the reader’s mind. No matter how many times we reopen “King Lear,” never shall we find the good king banging his tankard in high revelry, all woes forgotten, at a jolly reunion with all three daughters and their lapdogs. Never will Emma rally, revived by the sympathetic salts in Flaubert’s father’s timely tear. Whatever evolution this or that popular character has gone through between the book covers, his fate is fixed in our minds, and, similarly, we expect our friends to follow this or that logical and conventional pattern we have fixed for them. Thus X will never compose the immortal music that would clash with the second-rate symphonies he has accustomed us to. Y will never commit murder. Under no circumstances can Z ever betray us. We have it all arranged in our minds, and the less often we see a particular person the more satisfying it is to check how obediently he conforms to our notion of him every time we hear of him. Any deviation in the fates we have ordained would strike us as not only anomalous but unethical. We would prefer not to have known at all our neighbor, the retired hot-dog stand operator, if it turns out he has just produced the greatest book of poetry his age has seen.

This little gem, unearthed from Chapter 27 of Nabokov's engaging and enraging 1955 novel, speaks volumes.

Off (Left) Hand Thoughts

I pay special attention to the way the fingers of my left hand relate to one another (in half steps and whole steps) when I am playing the viola or the violin. I try to keep the structure of my left hand in mind all the time, and when I am teaching I pay special attention to the structure of my student's left hand. I try my best to get my student to do the same.

It can be difficult to feel half-steps between the fingers when you are holding your hand in the kind of twist necessary to play the violin or the viola.

(I like to call half-steps "kisses" with my younger students. When you have a lot of half-steps in a piece, you have really romantic music.)

The other day during a lesson I likened the experience of feeling half-steps to the experience you have when you put a piece of dark chocolate (75% cocoa is my favorite) on your tongue. At first you can barely taste it, but after a few moments of concentration (and perhaps a few drops of saliva) you "find" the flavor.

I just thought I'd share this here.

100 Pieces of Music in the IMSLP!

I'm pleased to say that I submitted my 100th piece of music into the IMSLP today!



You can see everything much more clearly on this page of the IMSLP. Go look around! Everything is in the public domain, and it can be downloaded for free.

If you are interested to see what number 100 is, you can find a listing of it on this page of my thematic catalog blog.

My Very Good Composerly Day Yesterday

I might remember September 25, 2018 as the best "composerly" day of my life so far. It began with a rehearsal and then a performance of three pieces for four violas and bass that I played with my fellow violists Jiyeon Schleicher, Anne Heiles, and Robin Kearton, and bass player Margaret Briskin. I recorded the performance, so you can listen through these Dropbox links:

Red Hot Dots
Pasticcio
Mary Jane Waltz

After the concert I went to listen to a rehearsal of "The Collar" that its dedicatees Ronald Hedlund and Barbara Hedlund are performing next month. Ron is a truly great opera singer, and an equally great actor, and Barbara is an excellent cellist who is willing and able to participate in the dialogue between narrator and cello as a dramatic equal. They had wonderful ideas, asked interesting questions, and found what I hope is the last typographical error in the text.

Then I returned home and found an email message from the conductor of Nicholas Yee, who conducts the seventh- and eighth-grade string orchestra at the Orange County School of the Arts in Santa Ana, California. He and his students made a recording for me of a run-through of my Scarborough Fair Fantasy, which they are performing on Friday at Symphony Hall in Santa Ana. It was so heartfelt a reading that it made me cry. Really.

I'll see if I can share a recording from the concert.

Funeral Music

A succession of funerals and memorial services seem to form a kind of dotted line winding its way through my fifth decade of my life. It's been four years since my brother's death, and the two memorial services we had for him in Memphis (hosted by his friends there) and in Newton (hosted by my mother). And then three years ago in August we had a memorial for my father-in-law, James Leddy that was followed the next year by a memorial service for my mother.

There are people in our town in Illinois that I see regularly at the funerals of our older friends, many of whom were either musicians or people who loved to attend concerts. 'Tis, in the spirit of the writer of Ecclesiastes, the season, I suppose.

I watched the public funerals of Aretha Franklin and John McCain on television, and engaged in public on-line mourning on the internets for two people most of us never would have met.

I was really moved by Franklin's family talking about her as a mother, a grandmother, and an aunt, making dinner, giving presents, and being extremely generous to her community. I carry an indelible imprint of her voice and musicianship in my inner ear, which can, thankfully, be reinforced by listening to her recordings. That public part of her will, for that reason, never die. The private part we heard about through her family remains in the memory of those fortunate to have known her.

The funeral for John McCain moved me in a very different way. I have rarely agreed with his positions, and seriously questioned many of his choices (particularly is running mate in the 2008 presidential campaign). He is responsible for opening up that particular "Pandora's box" which brought us closer to the political atmosphere of 2018. Still, the words spoken about him by Henry Kissinger (another person who I have never been in sympathy with) moved me. And what Barack Obama said about him touched my heart. One of the last threads of decency in the Republican party died with John McCain.

I loved the music for John McCain's funeral, particularly a setting of the 23rd Psalm by John Rutter and an arrangement for soprano, string quartet and accordion of "Danny Boy" by Bruce Coughlin played on tuned-up baroque-period instruments. There were also many inventive choral and orchestral settings of well-known American songs.

I found myself writing a piece of funeral music for trombone and piano that I titled "Obsequy" after a movement of a piece for solo viola that my brother Marshall wrote. We played a recording of Marshall's "Obsequy" during a memorial service for our mother. You can hear Daniele Colombo's beautiful recording of it here.

I dedicated my Obsequy, which is very different from Marshall's Obsequy, to Abbie Conant, my favorite trombone player. You can see the music on this page of my Thematic Catalog blog. You can also listen to a computer-generated recording here.

Thoughts about Memory

When I was a child I had a good memory. I could play lots of things by memory on the violin and the recorder. I even have visual musical memories from that time. I can visualize the pages of the "A Tune A Day" book that I first learned from. I remember the wallpaper in the room of the blue house (soldiers on a blue background) on 4 Post Road that we rented in Lenox, Mass during the Tanglewood season. I remember being really happy that I finally had arms long enough to play the 1/2-size violin that someone was kind enough to bring along for the summer. I don't remember asking for it, but I must have. I had just turned seven.

Anyway, this post is supposed to be about memory and not memories, so I will leave the blue house, and jump ahead to when I started playing flute a couple of years after I had abandoned the violin. I do remember that the last childhood piece I played on the violin with the first movement of the Seitz 5th Pupil's Concerto.

I started playing flute casually in the seventh grade, and started taking it VERY seriously in eighth grade. I had to practice really diligently to make up for lost time in order to keep up with my peers. I was very competitive, so my goal was to play better than my peers.

I practiced constantly, and found that I could play just about everything I learned by memory. I liked practicing outside (it was good for building up the sound production), so it was also practical. I never actually memorized, because it wasn't necessary. With the flute all the notes are always in the same places on the instrument, so playing from memory was essentially playing by ear. I never thought about the names of the notes I was playing. I never paid attention to what keys I was playing while running through my daily hour of scales and arpeggios. The tune was always the same. My fingers obeyed my ear without any necessary intervention by my brain.

I did occasionally marvel at the fact that I could play all kinds of patterns of notes without thinking about anything except for my sound production. I could probably play my whole set of scales and the excerpts that Julius Baker had his students play as part of a daily routine right now. All the orchestral excerpts I practiced for all the auditions I took are still hard-wired, but I couldn't for the life of me tell you what key any one of them is in without having a flute in my hands.

In 1980 I participated in an international competition in Budapest where everything had to be memorized. I worked all summer on my repertoire, playing it from memory on the streets of Graz just about every day. I arrived in Budapest in September and discovered that there were people from all over the world who had unusual and enticing ways of playing that were very different from the "Baker" way of playing I had "cloned."

I met a Hungarian harpsichord player who was eager to share his (then revolutionary) ideas about playing Bach. It was so exciting and interesting to learn that some of the Bach Flute Sonatas were modeled on Italian ideas, and that some were modeled on German ideas. I started listening for the differences. I remember hearing a flutist from Italy named Massimo (he was really tall--so tall that he couldn't stay in the dormitory with the other flutists because he too tall for the beds that they had) play the C major Bach Sonata in a way that sounded so beautifully Italian. I discovered that the E-major Sonata I was planning to play was also Italianate, but I discovered it too late to "inform" my interpretation. I had memorized the piece, and couldn't incorporate what my heart wanted to do with it. I didn't make any mistakes, but I didn't make the kind of music I had wanted to make.

I didn't make it into the finals. The person who won the competition was not one of the musically-interesting flutists I had heard. Oh well.

I keep thinking that I could have been far freer with my interpretation if I had the music to play from. Using the written notes and articulation as a starting point rather than an ending point is something that I have always found liberating. I hated playing from memory in such a setting. Where other people feel musically free without music in front of them, I felt (and still feel) musically confined.

I might have performed "Syrinx" from memory a few times after that, but otherwise I don't think I have ever performed from memory again.

When I started playing the violin in my early 30s I realized that I could not play the instrument properly without thinking about the notes I was playing. I could play passages and even occasionally pages without looking at music, but I no longer had the skill to memorize. Having to remember not only the notes and rhythms, but also what position the left hand needed to be in, and what direction my bow was supposed to go was too much for me.

My recurring phrase for my memory was "mind like a sieve." But with such an attitude every musical experience can be unique. Every trip around the fish bowl is a new experience. I can play pieces that I have played every day for years (really) and experience them in new ways if I open my mind up to musical possibilities (phrasing, organization of phrases, colors, dynamics, inner rhythms). It is almost exactly the opposite of my musical experience as a flutist.

From time to time I still try to play pieces from memory. A few years ago I tried to memorize the Gavotte en Rondeau from the Bach E-major Partita (in A major on the viola). I figured the repetitive structure might be one I could work with. It was a very difficult proposition. I don't know if I succeeded, but I do know that I tried.

Last week I decided to try the later movements of the G Major Cello Suite, and I somehow succeeded at being able to play the Courante, the Minuets, and the Gigue from memory. I tried my hand at the D minor Suite this morning. I can play some of it by ear, but not by memory. I found the process of "stapling" down my interpretation and "imprinting" it into my brain is not something I want to do with this endlessly-fascinating piece that I want to still be "new" every time I play it.

My Ramble on the The New Yorker's Survey of the "New-Music Landscape"

This week's The New Yorker includes a book review by Alex Ross that is identified in the table of contents as (oh how I remember the days when The New Yorker stood apart from all other magazines because it didn't have a table of contents) "Surveying the new-musical landscape." You can read it on page 81 of the magazine, or you can read it here. Oddly the link gives the title of the article as "the sounds of music in the twenty-first century," but what's in a title anyway, right?

The book review concerns Music after the Fall: Modern Composition and Culture Since 1989 by Tim Rutherford-Johnson. Like Ross, I know Rutherford-Johnson from his blog "The Rambler". Rutherford-Johnson has a post on his blog about the book that includes a table of contents, a short summary, and a link to a bunch of glowing reviews. The book looks interesting, and I do plan to read it.

From reading his blog from time to time over the years, I know Rutherford-Johnson is interested in a lot of music that I know little about, and have found that he doesn't write much about music that I am interested in, which is fine. There is much to know in this musical world. The menu is vast, and there is only so much room in any reasonable human stomach during any meal to consume more than a fraction of its (table of) contents at a time. And there are many restaurants in many cities, and in many towns.

Alex Ross says that Rutherford-Johnson's book has changed the way he listens to music. Wow. No book has ever done that for me.

Making the transition from living musical life as a flute player to living musical life as a violist changed the way I listen to music. As a flutist, and even as a violinist, I would listen from the top (which is so often the tune) down. Once I started playing viola in ensembles, I could actively listen to the treble from a position in the middle and to the bass from above. Even the most familiar music sounded completely different, and it drastically increased the dimension of my experience. Composing changes the way I listen to music because I can't help noticing the way other composers (both past and present) use the same elements of music I use, but in vastly different ways. Practicing Bach and Haydn on the piano also changes the way I listen to music, as well as the experience of playing the viola part of a familiar orchestral piece for the first time. Actually, every time.

Ross has sprinkled his review with the names of many female as well as male composers in this piece, even stating parenthetically, "The suffocating maleness of music history is at an end, even if the news has yet to reach most big-league orchestras and opera houses." One of these days Ross might "step out" and make the same statement without the "cloak" of parentheses. Still, it's a big leap from the days of The Rest is Noise, which I wrote a post about back in 2007. He even spends several paragraphs quoting Susan McClary. Even though I have a very different "world view" from McClary (she is an academic, I am a practicing musician), I appreciate Ross making mention of her.

He quotes McClary in relation to Steve Reich's "Different Trains," (written one year before the time Rutherford-Johnson has for the beginning of his survey). Ross says "Different Trains" "typifies the late-twentieth-century return to fundamentals--what McClary describes as 'composing for people.'"

If composers didn't compose for people before, who (or what) were they composing for?

There is a contemporary trend that some careerist composers (i.e. composers who want to make a living from composing and seek out commissions and partnerships that will keep them involved the musical "economic food chain") use to their benefit. It's the notion that music should be immediately accessible to audiences. In order to be that way it should be programmatic, and draw upon subject matter that can be explained, so that it makes the listening experience "relatable." Unfortunately the people who get left out of this equation can be the musicians themselves.

When music is written in a way that does not allow for physical grace and instrumental resonance, it is not a joy to practice, rehearse, or play. When the purpose of a musical gesture of phrase does not involve the creativity of the musicians who will be playing it (either by recognizing where it is compelled to go by the way it is written or by having a handful of equally good choices to make) what is printed on the page is merely an arrangement of pitches, rhythms, articulations, and dynamics with programmatic directions.

The minimalist repetitions that hypnotize listeners can cause tension in musicians (either from the movement or from not knowing if you are counting the repetitions correctly). In some situations complex rhythms can create tension without the opportunity for physical release. When that happens, the physical tension gets transferred to the people who are listening, and nobody has a good time.

I guess you could take McClary's comment in reference to the era that followed the prominence of strict twelve-tone music. It could easily be said that in the second part of the 20th century a lot of strict twelve-tone music (and other serial music) was written for the enjoyment of the composers who wrote it. Twelve-tone music is a lot of fun to write, and while you are in twelve-tone limbo land, where dissonance is good ("dissonance good") and consonance is to be avoided ("consonance bad"), lots of unusual and pleasurable things can happen, particularly at the keyboard, where the uniform tempered scale helps with consistency. Once you have an ensemble made of instruments that are not tempered like the piano, and once you take away any sense of tonic or dominant, playing in tune becomes a problem. You need a lot of rehearsal time to have a successful and rewarding performance.

Composers who end up writing music that is a joy to play, a joy to rehearse, and a joy to hear, are usually composers who write music for the pleasure of the musicians who will be playing it. It is the way it has always been, and as long as people blow into tubes, hit things, sing, and either draw horsehair across strings or pluck them, I believe it is the way it always will be.

Confessions of a Recovering Recovered CD Reviewer

I suppose that during the 23 twenty years I spent as a CD reviewer for the American Record Guide, my opinions about music were valid. I did listen carefully to all of the recordings I received, and I did always try to write statements that were true. How I managed write more than 50 reviews every year is a mystery to me.

I started reviewing while I working at the local university's radio station. During the Thanksgiving break of 1992, Michael and I went to the library to get a bunch of periodicals to read over the break. With a faculty card he could take periodicals out for more than one day. I remember that I got a few copies of The Strad and several issues of the American Record Guide, which I had never read.

I took issue with an essay written by the editor concerning "historically informed performance," and wrote him a long letter. He wrote back saying, "Too bad you can't write for us." I wrote back asking why I couldn't. A few weeks later a box of flute CDs and a style sheet arrived by mail. After a few months I asked if I could (please) have recordings other than flute recordings to review, and I became one of the chamber music reviewers.

I used to play the recordings I received to review on the air, where I could listen using high-quality speakers. It was actually an ideal situation because our (very small and underfunded) radio station could finally play brand new recordings of often unusual repertoire, providing an alternative to the repertoire of classical “hits” played by the other classical stations (well, we were classical in the morning) in our listening area. I donated some of the review copies to the station's library, and I put them into regular rotation, which made our library current and good (my goal for the radio station library was to have only excellent recordings to play). The writing, which took far more time than the listening, was something that I generally did at home, while raising two children and trying to learn to play a new instrument.

In 2000, when I left the radio station and went to graduate school (with a "grading" assistantship), things became far more difficult. I listened using headphones and a portable CD player, and I had to sandwich my review writing between marathon exam grading sessions and general graduate school work, in addition to composing and practicing. I suppose it was good practice for my days teaching music appreciation (which I was doing concurrently with private teaching and freelance orchestral playing, not to mention practicing and composing).

There were a few years when I also worked as the advertising manager for the magazine, a job that I wasn't at all cut out for, and it was then that I realized how much I disliked the whole business aspect of recordings. I was a little embarrassed when things I wrote in the ARG as "FINE" were quoted on people's websites and on CD covers. People also treated me differently when I was a reviewer. Famous people called me. Really.

I also had a CD storage problem, and an American Record Guide issue storage problem (we reviewers were supposed to make reference to old reviews). I dispensed with the plastic CD cases, and kept the CDs in large loose-leaf binders. Those still took up a great deal of shelf space. Since I rarely listened to those CDs for pleasure, they mostly sat there.

I stopped writing for the ARG a few years ago. I moved the books of CDs to the garage, where they sit undisturbed. I cut out the pages in the ARG issues that had my reviews, and put those pages in a zipped binder where they sit in the garage, next to the CD binders. I might even throw them away one of these days.

I mostly listen to live music now, and have made a point of going to more concerts. I do sometimes listen to music on the radio when I am in the car, and I do listen on YouTube now and again. Now that I don't have to make judgements about what I hear, I have a far greater appreciation for music than ever before.

Sleep Thou

This "fruit" (or flower) of the summer of 2018 sat around in my "abandoned music" file for about four years. I wrote in response to a call for scores setting the lullaby that Tatania sings to Bottom in Act IV, Scene 1 of A Midsummer Night's Dream for flute and soprano without accompaniment:

Sleep thou, and I will wind thee in my arms.
Fairies, begone, and be all ways away.

[fairies exit]

So doth the woodbine the sweet honeysuckle
Gently entwist; the female ivy so
Enrings the barky fingers of the elm.
O, how I love thee! how I dote on thee!

[they sleep]

It was not accepted by the performers, so I put it in a file and forgot about it.

My life this summer has been enhanced by vines (cucumber, zucchini, and tomato, mostly), and I found myself singing this song while working in the garden. I dusted it off and made a lot of improvements, and now I'm sharing it here.



You can listen to a computer-generated recording here, and you can find a PDF on this page of the IMSLP.

The songs mentions woodbine, which is another name for the the European kind of honeysuckle (Lonicera peliclymenum), and not the invasive Asian kind that is my nemesis.

And, just to be complete, here's a nice botanical drawing of some Ivy (I'm assuming the female parts are the little curly tendrils):