Arcadia Vanishing

Presto

Live performance by C4 (The Choral Composer/Conductor Collective, www.c4ensemble.org), conducted by Michael Conley, Saturday, May 31, 2014, at the Church of St. Luke in the Fields. 

Soloists: Melissa Wozniak, soprano; Melissa Bybee, mezzo-soprano; Colin Britt, tenor; Hayes Biggs, bass.

composed in celebration of my marriage to Susan Orzel, and is dedicated to her with all my love. The Choir of All Saints Church, New York City, under the direction of Dr. Gail Archer, gave the work its premiere at our wedding on January 16, 1999. The texts are biblical, from the Song of Songs, in Latin and English.

The main material of the motet is the opening unison melody for altos and tenors set to the words “Tota pulchra es, amica mea” (“You are all beautiful, my love”). The piece begins in a style that I would loosely describe as neo-Medieval, at times tinged with influences of Renaissance sacred polyphony. Gradually a solo quartet takes over, ultimately leading to the first major stylistic shift in the motet: the reappearance of the opening motive (presented in the soprano part, with one octave-displaced pitch) and words, sung by the full choir in a much more lush, Romantic harmonization. This introduces the English text beginning with the words, “Set me as a seal upon thine heart,” heard in a duet for altos and tenors. The culmination of the piece is a restatement of the Romantic harmonization of the initial Latin text a half step higher than before, with the initial English words presented as a countermelody in the altos and second tenors. A gradual winding down ensues, and at the end of the motet a solo tenor voice remains, singing a much slower variant of the opening melody on the words “pulchra es.”

-Hayes Biggs

Published by C. F. Peters Corporation, Edition Peters 67949, Copyright © 2000.

Texts and translation:

Tota pulchra es, amica mea, et macula non est in te.
(You are all beautiful, my love, and there is no flaw in you.)
Vox dilecti mei, en dilectus meus loquitur mihi:
(The voice of my beloved! Behold, my beloved speaks to me:)
Surge, amica mea.
(Arise, my love.)
Set me as a seal upon thine heart, as a seal upon thine arm:
For love is strong as death: jealousy is cruel as the grave.
Many waters cannot quench love, neither can the floods drown it.

Wedding Motet: Tota pulchra es/Set me as a seal upon thine heart (1998) (C4, 5/31/14)

Orange Cloud Nr 4

Arrivange 2

Sometimes, after staying in a village parlor till the family had all retired, I have returned to the woods, and partly with a view to the next day's dinner, spent the hours of midnight fishing from a boat by moonlight, serenaded by owls and foxes, and hearing, from time to time, the creaking note of some unknown bird close at hand. These experiences were very memorable and valuable to me,—anchored in forty feet of water, and twenty or thirty rods from the shore, surrounded sometimes by thousands of small perch and shiners, dimpling the surface with their tails in the moonlight, and communicating by a long flaxen line with mysterious nocturnal fishes which had their dwelling forty feet below, or sometimes dragging sixty feet of line about the pond as I drifted in the gentle night breeze, now and then feeling a slight vibration along it, indicative of some life prowling about its extremity, of dull uncertain blundering purpose there, and slow to make up its mind. At length you slowly raise, pulling hand over hand, some horned pout squeaking and squirming to the upper air. It was very queer, especially in dark nights, when your thoughts had wandered to vast and cosmogonal themes in other spheres, to feel this faint jerk, which came to interrupt your dreams and link you to Nature again. It seemed as if I might next cast my line upward into the air, as well as downward into this element, which was scarcely more dense. Thus I caught two fishes as it were with one hook.
—Henry David Thoreau


As Above, So Below

Het NAtionaal Symfonisch KAmerorkest
Enrique López - Cortón, conductor

Muziekgebouw aan ´t IJ
Amsterdam 2016, January

TAKEMITSU - My Way Of Life (fragment)

Premiere performance at Weill Recital Hall at Carnegie Hall, NYC, November of 1989, Washington Square Contemporary Music Society, with Constantine Cassolas, tenor, Linda Moss, viola, and Walter Hilse, piano.

" …in sad cypress…" (Three Songs on Texts by William Shakespeare) (1989)

To Becalme His Fever, for Chamber Orchestra: 1 Fl (Picc, A Fl); 1 Ob (EH); 1Cl (Bcl); 1 Bsn; 1 Hrn; 1 Tpt; 1 Tbn; Timpani; 2 Perc; Pf; Hp; Str (single or sections). 

For Edwin London and the Cleveland Chamber Symphony.

Performed here in a reading session by Riverside Symphony, George Rothman, conductor, Spring 1997. (This version uses a fuller string section, rather than solo strings.)


To Becalme His Fever was written for the Cleveland Chamber Symphony at the request of its Music Director, Edwin London. It is dedicated to the memory of Robert Stewart, a composer, friend and colleague of mine, who passed away in the summer of 1995.
The title is the same as that of a poem by Robert Herrick—well known to choral singers in a beautiful setting by Elliott Carter—which is reproduced below. [This same poem was the inspiration for my earlier work A Consuming Fire, for Flute, Oboe and Piano.] The idea of a fevered state, with its attendant insistent and obsessive quality, is never far away from the surface of this piece, though it is occasionally overcome by lyrical music which moves at a much more gradual pace. The work is in three major sections. The first, marked Clangorous, features bell-like chords for the full ensemble against a crazed, seemingly unrelated piccolo part. In the midst of this section a unison melody is introduced in the strings, brass and woodwinds, punctuated by piano and drums, which will in one or another pervade the remainder of the work. The second section features horn, woodwinds, harp, piano, tamtams, timpani, triangle and suspended cymbal against a curtain of sustained string sound. This gradually builds up to the third section, a truncated and varied reprise of the opening music, followed by a final restatement of the earlier unison melody—this time spread over three octaves in the strings—ending with sonorities which are again bell-like, but this time much softer.

—Hayes Biggs

To Musique, To Becalme His Fever

Charm me asleep, and melt me so
With thy Delicious Numbers;
That being ravisht, hence I goe
Away in easie slumbers.
Ease my sick head,
And make my bed,
Thou power that canst sever
From me this ill,
And quickly still,
Though thou not kill
My Fever.

Thou sweetly canst convert the same
From a consuming fire,
Into a gentle-licking flame,
And make it thus expire.
Then make me weep
My paines asleep;
And give me such reposes,
That I, poore I,
May think, thereby,
I live and die
‘Mongst roses.

Fall on me like a silent dew,
Or like those maiden showers,
Which, by the peepe of day, doe strew
A Baptime o’er the flowers.
Melt, melt my paines,
With thy soft straines;
That having ease me given,
With full delight,
I leave this light;
And take my flight
For Heaven.

—Robert Herrick, 1648



To Becalme His Fever (1995) (Second recording)

Sounding Body is made up of the images on the left, converted to sound.

Sounding Body

THRUSH begins with my reinterpretation of the same audio that Messiaen used for his transcriptions of the North American Songbirds, blackbird and wood thrush. These audio samples were digitized and analysed using PRAAT and C-Speech, from which I made new transcriptions that were more accurate representations of the physical acoustical signal. Of course, a temporal framework had to be established for these transcriptions, for which I decided to treat in a non-metrical fashion, since birds presumably do not think in terms of man-made meters and units. Then paired with the acoustical signal, I did research on the physical mechanism by which the birds produced sounds. These involved analyses of airflow, source, resonance and articulation for both blackbird and wood thrush. It was found that some bird species produce multiphonic & biphonic signals using paired bronchi, while others used a single bronchus. When using paired bronchi to produce two independent frequency contours, the dynamical interpretation would result in two simultaneous limit cycles; meanwhile, two independent frequency contours produced by a single bronchus would result in the occurrence of nonlinear phenomena, here interpreted as a torus.

#91. THRUSH performed by Moritz Ernst on 2020 - 11 - 06

What is my music? To compose music that is as wonderful as the first works of music I ever heard. I’m trying to create an experience that I call the “musical experience.”  Part of the creation of that effect is making something unexpected happen. It’s a combination of using sounds you think you understand, to create a result you know you don’t understand. I want to compose music that puts me in the position of innocence and recreate the feeling of innocence. Simply, I compose music I want to listen to.

As Above, So Below

Mark Gustavson

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