Spring SONGS
for Tenor and Instrumental Sextet
Written: 2019
Duration: ca. 20'
Instrumentation: tenor and instrumental sextet (flute, clarinet, percussion, piano, violin, cello)
Commissioned by Rick Teller for the American Modern Ensemble
World Premiere: American Modern Ensemble, Alok Kumar, tenor, Mostly Modern Festival, Saratoga Springs, NY, June 26, 2019.
Publisher: Bill Holab Music
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Also available as a version for tenor and piano
PROGRAM NOTes
Spring Songs for tenor and chamber ensemble or piano is my third song cycle celebrating the seasons. As with the first two, Winter Songs for bass-baritone and Summer Songs for soprano, this cycle contains settings of poems by various American poets.
Whereas both Winter Songs and Summer Songs end with scenes in New York City, Spring Songs begins with New York: a setting of English Sparrows (Washington Square) by Edna St. Vincent Millay, a poem about a scene that takes place in the morning in Greenwich Village, a neighborhood in New York City where Millay lived in the early 1900s. The second movement is a setting of April 5, 1974 by Richard Wilbur, a poem Wilbur wrote in honor of Robert Frost’s one-hundredth birthday, and I interpret as being about overcoming self-doubt through wisdom, and about understanding the change of seasons, but also a change of mind. The third movement, Done With by Ann Stanford, I interpret to be about death and rebirth. Stanford symbolizes this by a house being torn down and the ground paved over, the now suffocated plant life yearning to break through. The Widow’s Lament in Springtime, the fourth movement, is a setting of a poem by William Carlos Williams. I interpret this poem as a modernist, pastoral elegy that uses images of nature to lament the death of a loved one. The final movement, a setting of the poem Spring Rain by Sara Teasdale, is about a happy memory of a lover brought about by an evening thunderstorm.
Spring Songs was commissioned by Rick Teller for the American Modern Ensemble.
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SPRING SONGS
For tenor and instrumental sextet
English Sparrows (Washington Square)
How sweet the sound in the city an hour before sunrise,
When the park is empty and grey and the light clear and
so lovely
I must sit on the floor before my open window for an
hour with my arms on the sill
And my cheek on my arm, watching the spring sky’s
Soft suffusion from the roofed horizon upward with
palest rose,
Doting on the charming sight with eyes
Open, eyes closed;
Breathing with quiet pleasure the cool air cleansed by
the night, lacking all will
To let such happiness go, nor thinking the least thing ill
In me for such indulgence, pleased with the day and with
myself.
How sweet
The noisy chirping of the urchin sparrows from crevice
and shelf
Under my window, and from down there in the street,
Announcing the advance of the roaring competitive day
with city bird-song.– Edna St. Vincent Millay
English Sparrows (Washington Square) Copyright 1939 and renewed © 1967 by Edna St. Vincent Millay and Norma Millay Ellis. Text used by permission of Holly Peppe, Literary Executor, The Edna St. Vincent Millay Society.
April 5, 1974
The air was soft, the ground still cold.
In wet dull pastures where I strolled
Was something I could not believe.
Dead grass appeared to slide and heave,
Though still too frozen-flat to stir,
And rocks to twitch, and all to blur.
What was this rippling of the land?
Was matter getting out of hand
And making free with natural law?
I stopped and blinked, and then I saw
A fact as eerie as a dream.
There was a subtle flood of stream
Moving upon the face of things.
It came from standing pools and springs
And what of snow was still around;
It came of winter’s giving ground
So that the freeze was coming out,
As when a set mind, blessed by doubt,
Relaxes into mother-wit.
Flowers, I said, will come of it.
– Richard Wilbur
April 5, 1974 from Richard Wilbur, Collected Poems, 1943-2004, Copyright © 2006 by Richard Wilbur, reproduced by permission of Houghton Mifflin Publishing Company.
Done With
My house is torn down —
Plaster sifting, the pillars broken,
Beams jagged, the wall crushed by the bulldozer.
The whole roof has fallen
On the hall and the kitchen
The bedrooms, the parlor.
They are trampling the garden —
My mother’s lilac, my father’s grapevine,
The freesias, the jonquils, the grasses.
Hot asphalt goes down
Over the torn stems, and hardens.
What will they do in springtime
Those bulbs and stems groping upward
That drown in earth under the paving,
Thick with sap, pale in the dark
As they try the unrolling of green.
May they double themselves
Pushing together up to the sunlight,
May they break through the seal stretched above them
Open and flower and cry we are living.
– Ann Stanford
Done With from Holding Our Own: The Selected Poems of Anne Stanford, Copyright © 2001 by Ann Stanford, reproduced by permission of Penguin Random House.
The Widow’s Lament in SpringtimeSorrow is my own yard
where the new grass
flames as it has flamed
often before, but not
with the cold fire
that closes round me this year.
Thirty-five years
I lived with my husband.
The plum tree is white today
with masses of flowers.
Masses of flowers
load the cherry branches
and color some bushes
yellow and some red,
but the grief in my heart
is stronger than they,
for though they were my joy
formerly, today I notice them
and turn away forgetting.
Today my son told me
that in the meadows,
at the edge of the heavy woods
in the distance, he saw
trees of white flowers.
I feel that I would like
to go there
and fall into those flowers
and sink into the marsh near them.
– William Carlos Williams
This poem is in the public domain.
Spring RainI thought I had forgotten,
But it all came back again
Tonight with the first spring thunder
In a rush of rain.
I remembered a darkened doorway
Where we stood while the storm swept by,
Thunder gripping the earth
And lightning scrawled on the sky.
The passing motor busses swayed,
For the street was a river of rain,
Lashed into little golden waves
In the lamp light’s stain.
With the wild spring rain and thunder
My heart was wild and gay;
Your eyes said more to me that night
Than your lips would ever say. . . .
I thought I had forgotten,
But it all came back again
Tonight with the first spring thunder
In a rush of rain.
– Sara Teasdale
This poem is in the public domain.
Press Quotes
“The music for Paterson’s The Four Seasons [including Spring 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.”