Autumn SONGS

for Mezzo-Soprano and instrumental sextet

Written: 2019
Duration: 18’
Instrumentation: mezzo-soprano and instrumental sextet (flute, B-flat cl., vln., cello, perc. [vibraphone (motor needed), orchestra bells, med. sus. cym., low tam tam, med. and small triangles, Mark Tree, bell tree, low, medium, and high wood blocks, sand blocks, vibraslap, Flexatone], piano).
Autumn Songs was made possible, in part, by generous support from the Gerson Family Foundation
World PremiereAmerican Modern Ensemble, Blythe Gaissert, mezzo-soprano, Opera America’s National Opera Center, Marc A. Scorca Hall, New York, NY, October 30, 2019.
PublisherBill Holab Music

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A version for mezzo-soprano and piano is also available

PROGRAM NOTe

Autumn Songs for mezzo-soprano is my final song cycle celebrating the seasons. As with my previous three seasonal cycles for different voice types, this cycle contains settings of poems by various American poets.

Like Spring Songs, Autumn Songs begins with New York: a setting of Evelyn Scott’s Ascension: Autumn Dusk in Central Park, an early 20th century Imagist poem in which people seem to merge at dusk. The second movement is a setting of Under the Harvest Moon by Carl Sandburg. In this poem, Sandburg uses autumn and summer as a metaphor for people in two different periods of life, revealing beauty in both stages. Memory is the primary concern for someone who is older, and possibly for someone who is younger. The third movement is a setting of All Hallows’ Eve by Dorothea Tanning, who was not only a poet, but also a well-known visual artist whose early work was inspired by Surrealism. This is perhaps the most playful setting, and I used Tanning’s evocative, Surrealistic imagery as inspiration for colorful sounds and angular dissonances in the ensemble. November for Beginners by Rita Dove is the text for the fourth movement. In this setting, Dove beautifully encapsulates the feeling of waiting for winter in November, and the sense of anticipation one feels during the fall months. At the end of her poem, she uses the sound of zithers as a metaphor for the sounds of wind and rain when spring comes. The final movement, a setting of Leaves Before The Wind by May Sarton, is inspired by Irish jigs, and mimics leaves blowing in the wind. The penultimate section is anthemic, and the end of the movement is more calm and similar to the beginning.

Autumn Songs was made possible, in part, by generous support from the Gerson Family Foundation.

  • AUTUMN SONGS
    For mezzo-soprano and instrumental sextet

    Ascension: Autumn Dusk in Central Park

    Featureless people glide with dim motion through a quivering blue silver;
    Boats merge with the bronze-gold welters about their keels.
    The trees float upward in gray and green flames.
    Clouds, swans, boats, trees, all gliding up a hillside
    After some gray old women who lift their gaunt forms
    From falling shrouds of leaves.

    Thin fingered twigs clutch darkly at nothing.
    Crackling skeletons shine.
    Along the smutted horizons of Fifth Avenue
    The hooded houses watch heavily
    With oily gold eyes.

    – Evelyn Scott (1893-1963). Public doman. From Precipitations, 1920, Mahattan, The Unpeopled City.

    Under the Harvest Moon

    Under the harvest moon,
    When the soft silver
    Drips shimmering
    Over the garden nights,
    Death, the gray mocker,
    Comes and whispers to you
    As a beautiful friend
    Who remembers.

    Under the summer roses
    When the flagrant crimson
    Lurks in the dusk
    Of the wild red leaves,
    Love, with little hands,
    Comes and touches you
    With a thousand memories,
    And asks you
    Beautiful, unanswerable questions.

    – Carl Sandburg (1878-1967). Public domain.

    All Hallows’ Eve

    Be perfect, make it otherwise.
    Yesterday is torn in shreds.
    Lightning’s thousand sulfur eyes
    Rip apart the breathing beds.
    Hear bones crack and pulverize.
    Doom creeps in on rubber treads.
    Countless overwrought housewives,
    Minds unraveling like threads,
    Try lipstick shades to tranquilize
    Fears of age and general dreads.
    Sit tight, be perfect, swat the spies,
    Don’t take faucets for fountainheads.
    Drink tasty antidotes. Otherwise
    You and the werewolf: newlyweds.

    – Dorothea Tanning (1910-2012), from Coming to That: Graywolf Press, © 2011 by Dorothea Tanning. Reprinted with permission from Graywolf Press c/o The Permissions Company LLC.

    November for Beginners

    Snow would be the easy
    way out — that softening
    sky like a sigh of relief
    at finally being allowed
    to yield. No dice.
    We stack twigs for burning
    in glistening patches
    but the rain won’t give.

    So we wait, breeding
    mood, making music
    of decline. We sit down
    in the smell of the past
    and rise in a light
    that is already leaving.
    We ache in secret,
    memorizing

    a gloomy line
    or two of German.
    When spring comes
    we promise to act
    the fool. Pour,
    rain! Sail, wind,
    with your cargo of zithers!

    November 1981

    – Rita Dove (b. 1952). November for Beginners, from Collected Poems 1974-2004 by Rota Dove, W.W. Norton & Co., New York 2016. Used by permission of Rita Dove.

    Leaves Before the Wind

    We have walked, looked at the actual trees:
    The chestnut leaves wide-open like a hand,
    The beech leaves bronzing under every breeze,
    We have felt flowing through our knees
    As if we were the wind.

    We have sat silent when two horses came,
    Jangling their harness, to mow the long grass.
    We have sat long and never found a name
    For this suspension in the heart of flame
    That does not pass.

    We have said nothing; we have parted often,
    Not looking back, as if departure took
    An absolute will — once not again
    (But this is each day’s feat, as when
    The heart first shook).

    Where fervor opens every instant so,
    There is no instant that is not a curve,
    And we are always coming as we go;
    We lean toward the meeting that will show
    Love’s very nerve.

    And so exposed (O leaves before the wind!)
    We bear this flowing fire, forever free,
    And learn through devious paths to find
    The whole, the center, and perhaps unbind
    The mystery

    Where there are no roots, only fervent leaves,
    Nourished on meditations and the air,
    Where all that comes is also all that leaves,
    And every hope compassionately lives
    Close to despair.

    – May Sarton (1912-1995). Leaves before the Wind by May Sarton, from Collected poems: 1930-1993. © W.W. Norton & Company, 1993. Reprinted with permission from Russell & Volkening.

Press Quotes

The music for Paterson’s The Four Seasons [including Autumn Songs] is distinguished by lyricism and a vivid sense of colour. Each cycle’s mood is generally attuned to its season, such that a fresh, pastoral character informs spring whereas an at-times solemn quality infuses winter... There’s much to recommend in the release, from the work itself to the performances by the vocalists and instrumentalists, but one thing especially deserving of mention is how seamlessly Paterson matches the character of the music to the texts... It’s eminently possible that a listener lacking fluency in English would still derive a clear impression of the poets’ words from the composer’s musical material.
— Textura