A scene from my opera, "The Age of Innocence" by Edith Wharton. For more information on this piece, including the sung text, please visit my website at: davidowencarpenter.com/listen-2/

The Age of Innocence - Act 1, Scene 7

Abigail LaVecchia, piano

Recorded live in concert
March 2011
Boyer College of Music, Temple University
Philadelphia, PA

Paul Variations - Theme and Variations 1 and 11

The first movement of my song cycle, "From the Valley of Baca" (2016), based on the poems of Emma Lazarus and the 84th Psalm.

Lawrence Indik, baritone
Charles Abramovic, piano

Recorded September 2017
Philadelphia, PA

Not while the snow-shroud round dead earth is rolled, 
And naked branches point to frozen skies.— 
When orchards burn their lamps of fiery gold, 
The grape glows like a jewel, and the corn 
A sea of beauty and abundance lies, 
Then the new year is born. 

Blow, Israel, the sacred cornet! Call 
Back to thy courts whatever faint heart throb 
With thine ancestral blood, thy need craves all. 
The red, dark year is dead, the year just born 
Leads on from anguish wrought by priest and mob, 
To what undreamed-of morn? 

High above flood and fire ye held the scroll, 
Out of the depths ye published still the Word. 
No bodily pang had power to swerve your soul: 
Ye, in a cynic age of crumbling faiths, 
Lived to bear witness to the living Lord, 
Or died a thousand deaths. 

Kindle the silver candle’s seven rays, 
Offer the first fruits of the clustered bowers, 
The garnered spoil of bees. With prayer and praise 
Rejoice that once more tried, once more we prove 
How strength of supreme suffering still is ours 
For Truth and Law and Love.

				(“The New Year”)

From the Valley of Baca: Not While the Snow-Shroud

The first movement from my Trio (2014).

Rebecca Harris, violin
Myanna Harvey, viola
Cassia Harvey, cello

Recorded September-October 2017
Philadelphia, PA

Trio: Movement 1

The first movement from my Sonata (2015).

Katelyn Bouska, piano

Recorded December 2017
Philadelphia, PA

Sonata: Movement 1

Dylan Thomas reading his poem "Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good night" (recorded February 1952, New York, NY)

Sound manipulated in MetaSynth, sequenced in ProTools in October 2008.

Do Not Go Gentle: Concerto for Dylan Thomas

In November 1862, in the second year of the American Civil War, General Ambrose Burnside began to lead the Army of the Potomac to Richmond, VA, with the intent of seizing the Confederate capital. As it happened, the army ended up stalled in the town Fredericksburg where they encountered General Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia, arrayed on Marye’s Heights, a rise of land to the west of the town. When Union troops attempted to take the heights, a hail of Confederate gunfire repulsed the charge, leaving the field strewn with dying men. Union Colonel Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain recalled the night after the battle in a memoir published in 1887:

But out of that silence from the battle’s crash and roar rose new sounds more appalling still; a strange ventriloquism of which you could not locate the source…as if a thousand discords were flowing together into a key note…and underneath, all the time, that deep, bass note from closed lips, too hopeless or too heroic to articulate their agony.

The following night, as Union troops dug graves for their fallen comrades, the Northern Lights appeared in the sky; Chamberlain recalled this too in his memoir:

As we bore [the dead] in dark and sad procession, their own loved North took up the escort and lifting her glorious lights, led the triumphal march over the bridge that spans the worlds...Who would not pass on as they did, dead for their country’s life, and lighted to burial by the meteor splendors of their native sky?

The horror of the loss of human life at Fredericksburg was perhaps best put by Lee himself: “It is well that war is so terrible—we should grow too fond of it.”

De profundis clamavi ad te, Domine:                                       
Exaudi vocem meam                      
Fiant aures tuae intendentes        
In vocem deprecationis meae       

[Out of the depths I have cried to thee,  O Lord:
Hear my voice, 
Let thy ears be attentive
to the voice of my supplication.]

– Psalm 129

Vigil strange I kept on the field one night:
When you, my son and my comrade, dropt at my side that day,
One look I but gave, which your dear eyes return’d,
with a look I shall never forget;
One touch of your hand to mine, O boy, reach’d up as you lay on the ground;
Then onward I sped in the battle, the even-contested battle.
Till late in the night again I made my way;
Found you in death so cold, dear comrade—found your body, son of responding kisses,
(never again on earth responding;)
Bared your face in the starlight—curious the scene—cool blew the night-wind;
Long there and then in vigil I stood, dimly around me the battlefield spreading;
Vigil wondrous and vigil sweet, there in the fragrant silent night;
But not a tear fell, not even a long-drawn sigh—Long, long I gazed;
Passing sweet hours, immortal and mystic hours with you, dearest comrade—
Not a tear, not a word;
Vigil of silence, love and death—vigil for you my son and my soldier,
As onward silently stars aloft, eastward new ones upward stole;
Vigil final for you, brave boy, (I could not save you, swift was your death,
I faithfully loved you and cared for you living—
I think we shall surely meet again;)
Till at latest lingering of the night, indeed just as the dawn appear’d,
My comrade I wrapt in his blanket, envelop’d well his form,
And there and then by the rising sun, my son in his grave,
in his rude-dug grave I laid;
Ending my vigil strange with that—vigil of night and battlefield dim;
Vigil for boy of responding kisses, (never again on earth responding;)
Vigil for comrade swiftly slain—vigil I never forget, how as day brighten’d,
I rose from the chill ground, folded my soldier well in his blanket,
And buried him where he fell.

– Walt Whitman

Lux aeterna luceat eis, Domine,     
Cum sanctis tuis in aeternum.

[Let eternal light shine on them Lord,
With thy saints in eternity.]

– Requiem mass

William Stone, bar.; Temple University Concert Choir & Chamber Orchestra; Alan Harler, cond.

Recorded Nov. 2007, Philadelphia, PA

Fredericksburg

In my vocal music, I feel strongly that the music should illumine the text by revealing the essence of the words’ meaning, and give them a power of expression that goes beyond a reading of the words without music. To achieve this, I find it is also important to choose a text that has room for the music—there are some great poems whose so dense with meaning that I feel would benefit little from a musical setting (Shakespeare’s sonnets are a good example). The text of these Two Songs offered me beautiful words whose expression could be heightened by the music: “Old Adam” is a wonderfully freakish poem by the 19th-century English poet Thomas Lovell Beddoes, whose references to “the wind dying” offered an opportunity to employ the baritone’s falsetto range, highlighting the eerie mood of the words. Yeats’s “The Sorrow of Love” is a kind of lamenting epilogue to the Beddoes—more lyrical in tone, but referring back to the first song with the words “and his cry” sung in falsetto. The element of sorrow that permeates both poems serves to bind the two songs together, forming a kind of portrait of grief for the entire work.

Old Adam, the carrion crow,
The old crow of Cairo;
He sat in the shower, and let it flow
Under his tail and over his crest;
And through every feather
Leak’d the wet weather;
And the bough swung under his nest;
For his beak it was heavy with marrow.
Is that the wind dying? O no;
It’s only two devils, that blow,
Through a murderer’s bones, to and fro,
In the ghosts’ moonshine.

Ho! Eve, my grey carrion wife,
When we have supped on king’s marrow,
Where shall we drink and make merry our life?
Our nest it is queen Cleopatra’s skull,
‘Tis cloven and crack’d,
And batter’d and hack’d,
But with tears of blue eyes it is full:
Let us drink then, my raven of Cairo!
Is that the wind dying? O no;
It’s only two devils, that blow
Through a murderer’s bones, to and fro,
In the ghosts’ moonshine.

– Thomas Lovell Beddoes

The brawling of a sparrow in the eaves
The brilliant moon and all the milky sky,
And all that famous harmony of leaves,
Had blotted out man’s image and his cry.

A girl arose that had red mournful lips
And seemed the greatness of the world in tears,
Doomed like Odysseus and the laboring ships
And proud as Priam murdered with his peers,

Arose, and on the instant clamorous eaves,
A climbing moon upon an empty sky,
And all that lamentation of the leaves,
Could but compose man’s image and his cry.

– William Butler Yeats

Lawrence Indik, baritone
Charles Abramovic, piano
Recorded live in concert
January 2010
Boyer College of Music, Temple University
Philadelphia, PA

Two Songs

I am a composer living in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA. For my complete bio and more information about my music, please visit www.davidowencarpenter.com.

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