Honorable Mention, 2020 International Call for Choral/Orchestral Scores, Calliope Music

When I was asked to write a piece commemorating the end of the Civil War for the New Hampshire Master Chorale, I found myself stymied at first. While this is a topic that resonates strongly with me, I felt that I’d already written works for the Master Chorale that explored much of the emotional territory I associate with that conflict. Then their music director, Dan Perkins, mentioned a text he was interested in having me set—Herman Melville’s poem “Shiloh.”

“Shiloh” comes from Melville’s book of poetry about the Civil War, Battle-Pieces. Although Melville’s sympathy for the Union cause is plain from the outset, many of the poems in the book that struck me powerfully—as strange, remote, almost forbidding—are written from what I came to think of as a “God’s-eye” perspective on the war. They blame the tragedies of battle on horrible decisions by human beings with free will on both sides of the conflict—human beings usually far distant from the battlefields where so many young men died.

I took the final stanza of an early poem in Melville’s book, The Conflict of Convictions, as the epigraph for my settings:

YEA, AND NAY—
EACH HATH HIS SAY;
BUT GOD HE KEEPS THE MIDDLE WAY.
NONE WAS BY
WHEN HE SPREAD THE SKY;
WISDOM IS VAIN, AND PROPHESY.
——JS

I. THE PORTENT. (1859.)
Hanging from the beam,
  Slowly swaying (such the law),
Gaunt the shadow on your green,
   Shenandoah!
The cut is on the crown
(Lo, John Brown),
And the stabs shall heal no more.
Hidden in the cap
  Is the anguish none can draw;
So your future veils its face,
   Shenandoah!
But the streaming beard is shown
(Weird John Brown),
The meteor of the war.

II. BALL'S BLUFF. A REVERIE. (OCTOBER, 1861.)
One noonday, at my window in the town,
   I saw a sight—saddest that eyes can see—
   Young soldiers marching lustily
     Unto the wars,
With fifes, and flags in mottoed pageantry;

They moved like Juny morning on the wave,
   Their hearts were fresh as clover in its prime
   (It was the breezy summer time),
     Life throbbed so strong,
How should they dream that Death in a rosy clime
  Would come to thin their shining throng?
Youth feels immortal, like the gods sublime.
Weeks passed; and at my window, leaving bed,
  By night I mused, of easeful sleep bereft,
On those brave boys (Ah War! thy theft);
    Some marching feet
Found pause at last by cliffs Potomac cleft;
    Wakeful I mused, while in the street
Far footfalls died away till none were left.

III. SHILOH.
A REQUIEM.
(APRIL, 1862.)
(APRIL, 1862.) Skimming lightly, wheeling still,
   The swallows fly low
Over the field in clouded days,
    The forest-field of Shiloh—
Over the field where April rain
Solaced the parched ones stretched in pain
Through the pause of night
That followed the Sunday fight
    Around the church of Shiloh—
The church so lone, the log-built one,
That echoed to many a parting groan
    And natural prayer
Of dying foemen mingled there—
Foemen at morn, but friends at eve—
    Fame or country least their care:
(What like a bullet can undeceive!)
        But now they lie low,
While over them the swallows skim,
And all is hushed at Shiloh.

IV. AURORA-BOREALIS. COMMEMORATIVE OF THE DISSOLUTION OF ARMIES AT THE PEACE.
(MAY, 1865.)
What power disbands the Northern Lights
  After their steely play?
The lonely watcher feels an awe
   Of Nature's sway,
     As when appearing,
     He marked their flashed uprearing
In the cold gloom—
   Retreatings and advancings,
(Like dallyings of doom),
   Transitions and enhancings,
     And bloody ray.

The phantom-host has faded quite,
  Splendor and Terror gone—
Portent or promise—and gives way
   To pale, meek Dawn;
     The coming, going,
     Alike in wonder showing—
Alike the God,
  Decreeing and commanding
The million blades that glowed,
  The muster and disbanding—
     Midnight and Morn.

—Herman Melville (1819–1891), alt.

Battle-Pieces

3 - Ebb

2- The Buck In The Snow

1 - Mortal Flesh, Is Not Your Place In The Ground

7 -- SB Schillers Spoons Excerpt

6 -- SB Imagined Artifacts Excerpts

5 -- SB Inspector Clavinet Excerpt

4 -- SB Brilliant Being Closing Credits Remix

3 -- SB Brilliant Being Orig Sounds - Effects Made

2 -- SB Two Letters Of Sulpicia Acoustic Excerpt

1 -- SB Later Viola Solo

1E&A2& (MIDI)

Battle - Pieces I

Battle - Pieces II

Battle - Pieces III

Battle - Pieces IV

Comfort Ye (MIDI)

Living With Squirrels

Smoking Drinking Messing Around

Time Has Cast It All Far Back

Schiller’s Spoons is dedicated to my dear friend and FIERCE artist Amanda Whitworth (née Schiller), who once told me about an early work she’d choreographed in which the dancers “threw spoons all around the stage.” All the sounds heard in Schiller’s Spoons are derived from digital recordings of cheap stainless teaspoons – singles, pairs, and bunches, clicked together, thrown onto various surfaces, etc. To my ear, the piece divides into five short sections – Prelude, Processional, Gawrshing, Trap Set Solo, and Recessional with Spoons.

Schillers Spoons

All the sounds in Fuck No Coffee were derived from the phrase heard at the beginning of the piece, which I spoke into my cell phone in gratitude one sleepy morning. When I was a kid, my dad called me “Gerald McBoing Boing,” after the ‘50s UPA cartoon character who made mouth noises instead of speech. While creating this piece, I was delighted to discover that digital media allowed me to play with mouth noises far more extensively than I could during my childhood.

Fuck No Coffee

Abstracted (for string quartet -- MIDI version)

Jonathan Santore

Pinned to spotlight

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