Fisherman Songs is a song cycle of seven eclectic songs about fishing using the following texts: 
The Fisherman's Prayer (Anon.)
from "Halieutica" (Oppian of Corycus)
The Fisherman (W. B. Yeats)
Nighttime (Ken Abrames)
The Baite (John Donne)
The Fishing Rod (Shen Yüeh)
As Above, So Below (Henry David Thoreau)

featuring Christopher Herbert, baritone and Timothy Long, piano

Fisherman Songs

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

Lord, suffer me to catch a fish so large that
even I in talking of it afterward shall have no
need to lie.
—Anonymous


Fisherman's Prayer

A bite, hurrah! the length'ning of the line extends,
Above the tugging fish the arch'd reed bends:
He struggles hard, and noble sport will yield
My leige, ere wearied out he quits the field.
See how he swims up, down, and now athwart
The rapid stream—now pausing as in thought;
And now you force him from the azure deep:
He mounts, he bends, and with resilient leap
Bounds into air!
—Oppian of Corycus


Halieutica

Although I can see him still,
The freckled man who goes
To a grey place on a hill
In grey Connemara clothes
At dawn to cast his flies,
It's long since I began
To call up to the eyes
This wise and simple man.
All day I'd looked in the face
What I had hoped 'twould be
To write for my own race
And the reality;
The living men that I hate,

The dead man that I loved,
The craven man in his seat,
The insolent unreproved,
And no knave brought to book
Who has won a drunken cheer,
The witty man and his joke
Aimed at the commonest ear,
The clever man who cries
The catch cries of the clown,
The beating down of the wise
And great Art beaten down.

Maybe a twelvemonth since
Suddenly I began,
In scorn of this audience,
Imagining a man,
And his sunfreckled face,
And grey Connemara cloth,
Climbing up to a place
Where stone is dark under froth,
And the downturn of his wrist
When the flies drop in the stream;
A man who does not exist,
A man who is but a dream;
And cried, 'Before I am old
I shall have written him one
poem maybe as cold
And passionate as the dawn.'
—W. B. Yeats


The Fisherman

Nighttime is a time when being alone on the shoreline on the rocks or beach with the stars or grey clouds, or blackness of clouds with no moon, can bring you so very close to awareness of the mystery of life that we are witness to. I don't know why this is so and I never will know. I feel it though I feel it so strongly when I walk in those places where no one is except me and other nocturnal beings.

I find the stars on those starry nights speak to me in a place where there are no words, yet I feel an ache to know each of them, a yearning to touch them somehow and there is a strange emptiness in my stomach, a vibration that isn't there and is nonetheless. Then I see a familiar star and the mind grabs my awareness and fixes it on the known. And a voice, I think it's mine, says to no one in particular and me, "The Big Dipper! And where is the North Star? Oh! There it is." And at that moment I spin around and view another star that I do not know and welcome my deliverance from that interruptive voice and renew my wonder at it all again.

Some nights the clouds are strong and black and the blackness of the sky and sea envelope me. In truth I am blind to light for there is none but there is blackness and it is not all the same, and somehow, I do not know why or how, I know where I am and where a fish may be. And I know this is true. I know by the gentle tap he sends to me, to the hand I have that he touches in response to my reaching out to where he lays through my cast. This fish's touch makes it true. In the blackness I see but not light, I see some other way that no one, only nature, teaches and you can touch with this seeing which cannot be described in words but can be felt somehow by all.

Gray nights are very different. They seem joyous late at night. The eyes delight in night skies that are gray, not more than stars though. All the same, gray skies at night are not like nights alone in blackness or under starlight. They are kin to the day, to dawn and dusk and are extensions of them in a way. The light lingers in them. It does, although I do not know how this is true, but it is somehow. And the fish are seen in grayskied nights and the feel of them is different than in blackness or in starlight. For fishing, I'll take the night. It is so very much alive, I'll take the night and the awareness of the mystery of all life and my life it brings. It's the feel of it, just the feel of it and nothing more.
—Ken Abrames


Nighttime

Come live with mee, and bee my love,
And wee will some new pleasures prove
Of golden sands, and christall brookes,
With silken lines, and silver hookes.

There will the river whispering runne
Warm'd by thy eyes, more than the Sunne.
And there the 'inamor'd fish will stay,
Begging themselves they may betray.

When thou wilt swimme in that live bath,
Each fish, which every channell hath,
Will amorously to thee swimme,
Gladder to catch thee, than thou him.

If thou, to be so seene, beest loath,
By Sunne, or Moone, thou darknest both,
And if my selfe have leave to see,
I need not their light, having thee.

Let others freeze with angling reeds,
And cut their legges, with shells and weeds,
Or treacherously poore fish beset,
With strangling snare, or windowie net:
Let coarse bold hands, from slimy nest
The bedded fish in banks outwrest,
Or curious traitors, sleavesilk flies
Bewitch poor fishes wandring eyes.

For thee, thou needst no such deceit,
For thou thy selfe art thine owne bait,
That fish, that is not catch'd thereby,
Alas, is wiser farre than I.
—John Donne


The Baite

Not only does my "cassia boat" drift
"easily and free," But verdant banks are also winding in and out. My light line stirs the tender water plants; The muffled oars arouse a solitary duck. I tap the gunwales, heedless that the sun is setting; Till my dying day 
I'll make this my delight.
—Shen Yüeh


The Fishing Rod

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.

The Fishing Rod

Mark Gustavson

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