Sandburg Songs

Carl Sandburg once wrote that “Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance.” So, too, with these poems where, in conjunction with their vivid surface imagery, deeper meanings, echoes from the depths, emerged in the search for how love’s warmth, remembrance, and longing can intertwine. Those themes and others shaped my compositional approach.

Delineating both surface and deeper meanings within the music largely involved text painting, a process that determined structure, harmony, melody, rhythm, and so on. For a few examples, notice the sweep of the piano and strings at the beginning of “You Remember” (“The sunset swept to the valley’s west”). In both “You Remember” and “Some I Keep,” polyphony and counterpoint suggest the intertwining and recapitulation of memories that persist, sometimes even beyond death itself. In the first poem of “A Face I Know,” the strings alternate between two chords to mirror “the lungs of the earth” breathing in and out; in the second poem, the piano figurations sometimes signify raindrops, especially notable at the end as the chorus sings, “And the peace of long warm rain.” The harmonic language is modern and sometimes complex, employing extended chords, polychords and some jazz-based sonorities. The piano part is at times virtuosic. Vocal ranges are: Soprano: Bb3 to B5; Alto: G3 to D#5; Tenor: Bb2 to G#4; Bass: Db2 to Db4. The choral part is replete with divisi. Total performance time is ≈17 minutes. The work was premiered 9/26/2022 by the Utah Chamber Artists.

These poems, the music, and their attendant echoes and shadows are offered as a framework for insights into the human and timeless themes of love, longing, and memory.

Movement I: You Remember
“Valley Song” from Smoke and Steel

The sunset swept
To the valley’s west, you remember.
The frost was on.
A star burnt blue.
We were warm, you remember,
And counted the rings on a moon.
The sunset swept
To the valley’s west
And was gone in a big dark door of stars.

Movement II: Some I Keep
“Troths” from Chicago Poems
Yellow dust on a bumble
bee’s wing,
Grey lights in a woman’s
asking eyes,
Red ruins in the changing
sunset embers:
I take you and pile high
the memories.
Death will break her claws
on some I keep.

Movement III: A Face I Know
“Silver Wind” from Smoke and Steel and “Monotone” from Chicago Poems

(Silver Wind)
Do you know how the dream looms? how if summer misses one of us the two of us miss summer—
Summer when the lungs of the earth take a long breath for the change to low contralto singing mornings when the green corn leaves first break through the black loam—
And another long breath for the silver soprano melody of the moon songs in the light nights when the earth is lighter than a feather, the iron mountains lighter than a goose down—
So I shall look for you in the light nights then, in the laughter of slats of silver under a hill hickory.
In the listening tops of the hickories, in the wind motions of the hickory shingle leaves,
in the imitations of slow sea water on the shingle silver in the wind—
I shall look for you.

(Monotone)
The monotone of the rain is beautiful,
And the sudden rise and slow relapse
Of the long multitudinous rain.
The sun on the hills is beautiful,
Or a captured sunset sea-flung,
Bannered with fire and gold.
A face I know is beautiful--
With fire and gold of sky and sea,
And the peace of long warm rain.

1 - Conductor Score (Full Score)

1 - Piano

4 - Violin 1
4 - Violin 2
3 - Viola
2 - Violoncello
2 - Contrabass