Instrumentation |
Piano, Tenor, Male choir |
Type of score |
Piano-vocal score |
Publisher |
Stephen Smith |
Language |
English |
Difficulty |
Advanced |
Duration |
8'30 |
A substantial, eight-and-a-half-minute work for tenor soloist, male chorus, and piano, this setting of poetry by Walt Whitman was commissioned by Chor Leoni Men's Choir and their founding director, DIane Loomer, for the choir's annual Remembrance Day concerts in 2006. Chor Leoni has recorded the piece and performed it many times since then, and it never fails to elicit a strong emotional response from singers and audience alike.
The piece is in four sections: Introduction, Litany, Incantation, and Lullaby. I have made the first two sections available in both the score preview and the audio file (which is excerpted, with permission, from a recording of a live performance by Chor Leoni, with Bruce Hoffmann, soloist, Ken Cormier, piano, and Diane Loomer conducting).
The piece begins with the sound of Civil War cannons echoing across the landscape, and the acrid scent of gunpowder hovering in the air (both of these suggested by the piano). Then the tenor soloist, accompanied by the full chorus, a cappella, describes Whitman's vision of "The Mother of All" stalking pensively among the "torn bodies" on a battlefield, and calling upon the Earth to take the bodies and blood of the slain soldiers unto itself.
The chorus, accompanied by piano, then call upon various elements of Nature to preserve the essences of all the dead; interspersed with these invocations are three refrains, each bigger and fuller than the last, with the text, "Absorb them well, O my Earth! I charge you: lose not my sons!"
After the Litany's climactic final refrain, the chorus and soloist in turn begin quietly chanting a spell to lock away the life-forces of those who perished in battle, "holding them in trust" so that they can be given back "many a year hence," like a fragrance exhaled from the earth. The chants layer upon each other in various ways, and eventully coalesce into a murmured Lullaby: "Give me my darlings back again, / Give me my darlings back. / Give my immortal heroes back, / Give me my darlings back. / Centuries hence, exhale me them, / Breathe me their breath, centuries hence. / Give my immortal heroes back, / Let not an atom be lost."
As the lullaby fades into silence, there are three soft chimes on the piano (in which we hear an echo of the ugly thuds of cannons that opened the piece) and a wispy figure (reminiscent of the figure that earlier portrayed the stench of gunpowder, but now transformed into something sweet and wholesome) that wafts over everything as the piece concludes.