The composer writes: I’m often attracted to historical models for my compositions. And this miniature, two-movement sonata (similar to contrasting movements in a Handel sonata) is full of references to baroque- and gallant-era styles. When I began to compose it, I wasn’t quite sure what solo instrument would be best suited to what I was creating: The solo part could, of course, be played on a variety of instruments. But I am very pleased with my final choice of tenor recorder.

Performed by Alison Melville, recorder; and Christopher Bagan, harpsichord.

Recorded and edited by John Gray

Two Pieces for Tenor Recorder and Harpsichord (2022)

The composer writes: Souvenir of Triton (1990) is composed in the tradition of the 19th-century souvenir piece, intended to evoke the memory of a place. However, there is an obvious irony here: this piece recalls a place no person has ever visited.

Triton, the largest of the planet Neptune’s moons, was discovered by the astronomer William Lassell in 1846. However, little was known about Triton until August 1989, when the space probe Voyager 2 passed close to Neptune and transmitted information on the planet and its satellites back to Earth. This information revealed Triton to be surely one of the most inhospitable places in the solar system, with a thin atmosphere comprised of nitrogen and methane, and a surface temperature of approximately -200C degrees. Also discovered on Triton were “volcanoes” through which liquid nitrogen is forced up to the surface from an estimated depth of 20 kilometres.

Performers: Laurel Mascarenhas, violin; Timothy Minthorn, piano.

Souvenir of Triton (1990)

The composer writes: The texts I’ve used in Three American Poems About Love (2020) are not all love songs in the conventional sense. The first, “Invitation to Love” (by Paul Laurence Dunbar) is a glowing reflection on the nature of love itself, rather than an expression of love directed towards a specific other. The second, “Spring Night” (by Sara Teasdale) is a wistful reflection on lovelessness, despite the consolations of beauty. Only the third, “Our Love” (by James Russell Lowell) is a love song in the conventional sense: a profession of enduring love between two people.
 
Performers: Coro Volante; Brett Scott, conductor

TEXTS

I: Invitation to Love
Paul Laurence Dunbar

Come when the nights are bright with stars
Or come when the moon is mellow;
Come when the sun his golden bars
Drops on the hay-field yellow.
Come in the twilight soft and gray,
Come in the night or come in the day,
Come, O love, whene’er you may,
And you are welcome, welcome.
 
You are sweet, O Love, dear Love,
You are soft as the nesting dove.
Come to my heart and bring it to rest
As the bird flies home to its welcome nest.
 
Come when my heart is full of grief
Or when my heart is merry;
Come with the falling of the leaf
Or with the redd’ning cherry.
Come when the year’s first blossom blows,
Come when the summer gleams and glows,
Come with the winter’s drifting snows,
And you are welcome, welcome.
 
II: Spring Night
Sara Teasdale

The park is filled with night and fog,
The veils are drawn about the world,
The drowsy lights along the paths
Are dim and pearled.
 
Gold and gleaming the empty streets,
gold and gleaming the misty lake,
The mirrored lights like sunken swords,
Glimmer and shake.
 
Oh, is it not enough to be
Here with this beauty over me?
My throat should ache with praise, and I
Should kneel in joy beneath the sky.
O, Beauty are you not enough?
Why am I crying after love,
With youth, a singing voice and eyes
To take earth's wonder with surprise?
Why have I put off my pride,
Why am I unsatisfied,
I for whom the pensive night
Binds her cloudy hair with light,
I, for whom all beauty burns
Like incense in a million urns?
O, Beauty, are you not enough?
Why am I crying after love?
 
III: Our Love
James Russell Lowell

Our love is not a fading, earthly flower: 
Its wingèd seed dropped down from Paradise,   
And, nursed by day and night, by sun and shower,           
Doth momently to fresher beauty rise:  
To us the leafless autumn is not bare,
Nor winter’s rattling boughs lack lusty green,     
Our summer hearts make summer’s fulness, where        
No leaf, or bud, or blossom may be seen:             
For nature’s life in love’s deep life doth lie,          
Love,—whose forgetfulness is beauty’s death,
Whose mystic key these cells of Thou and I          
Into the infinite freedom openeth,          
And makes the body’s dark and narrow grate     
The wind-flung leaves of Heaven’s palace-gate.

Three American Poems About Love (2020)

The composer writes: Ashes of Soldiers (2010-2012) began its life as a chamber work for soprano, clarinet and piano. I subsequently orchestrated the piece, replacing the piano with strings and harp.
 
The piece is in two movements: the first is for clarinet, harp and strings; in the second, a soprano is added to the ensemble. Thematically, the two movements – which are performed without pause – are closely related. Rather than composing two contrasting, discrete pieces, my intention was to make the second movement a continuation and development of the musical ideas introduced in the first.
 
The text is based on a poem by Walt Whitman, from his Leaves of Grass. Despite the poem’s specific setting in Civil-War era USA, its theme is universal: the mourning of all soldiers who have died in battle, regardless of their allegiances.
 
Ashes of Soldiers is dedicated to my father, Alan James Eatock, who was a soldier at one point in his life, and who passed away in 2010.

Performers: Lynn Anoush Isnar, soprano; Kornel Wolak, clarinet; Sinfonia Toronto, Nurhan Arman conducting.

TEXT
(Based on a poem by Walt Whitman)
 
Noiseless as mists and vapors,
From their graves in the trenches ascending,
From the cemeteries all through Virginia and Tennessee,
From every point of the compass,
Out of the countless unnamed graves,
In wafted clouds, in myriads large,
Or squads of twos and threes,
Or single ones they come,
And silently gather round me.
 
Phantoms of countless lost!
Invisible to the rest,
Henceforth become my companions!
Follow me ever!
Desert me not while I live.
 
Sweet are the blooming cheeks of the living!
Sweet are the musical voices sounding!
But sweet, ah sweet are the dead,
With their silent eyes.
 
Dearest comrades!
All is over and long gone;
But love is not over, and what love O comrades!
 
Perfume from battlefields,
Rising up, from foetor arising,
Perfume all!
Make all wholesome!
Make these ashes to nourish and blossom,
O love!
 
Give me exhaustless,
Make me a fountain,
That I exhale love from me,
Wherever I go,
Like a moist perennial dew,
For the ashes of all dead soldiers.

Ashes Of Soldiers (2010 - 2012)

The composer writes: In choosing to compose for just three instruments, I created a problem for myself. The basic "building blocks" of my music are usually four-note chords – so how was I to write for a medium in which a four-note chord is impossible? I enjoyed the challenge!

Performers: Heather MacDonald, oboe; Le Lu, clarinet; Christian Sharpe, bassoon.

Score and parts available online from:

Canadian Music Centre
J W Pepper
Sheet Music Direct
Musicaneo
Sonolize
Score Exchange

Trio for Woodwinds (2023)

The composer writes: This concert overture was inspired by a 1922 watercolour painting by Wassily Kandinsky, To the Sea and the Sun. Kandinsky was himself influenced by music, and believed there are strong connections between visual and aural art-forms. ("Music is the ultimate teacher," he said.) I like to think that the dramatic colours and bold lines of Kandinsky's abstract art are in some way analogous to my use of instrumental colour and texture in this short orchestral work.

To The Sea and the Sun (2023)

The composer writes: the American poet Hart Crane was born in Garrettsville, Ohio, in 1899, and spent much of his (short) adult life in New York City. He was much influenced by the modernist style of T.S. Eliot, and is best known for his epic poem, The Bridge. He died in an apparent suicide, jumping from a ship in the Gulf of Mexico in 1932.

The four poems I have chosen to set to music were written by Crane in the 1920s. They are introspective and observational in character, capturing the mood and spirit of their varied subjects.

Performed by tenor Alexander Cappellazzo and harpist Alanna Ellison

TEXTS

I: Forgetfulness
Forgetfulness is like a song
That, freed from beat and measure, wanders.
Forgetfulness is like a bird whose wings are reconciled,
Outspread and motionless,
A bird that coasts the wind unwearyingly.
Forgetfulness is rain at night,
Or an old house in a forest, or a child.
Forgetfulness is white, white as a blasted tree,
And it may stun the sybil into prophecy,
Or bury the Gods.
I can remember much forgetfulness.
 
II: Garden Abstract
The apple on its bough is her desire,
Shining suspension, mimic of the sun.
The bough has caught her breath up, and her voice,
Dumbly articulate in the slant and rise
Of branch on branch above her, blurs her eyes.
She is prisoner of the tree and its green fingers.
And so she comes to dream herself the tree,
The wind possessing her, weaving her young veins,
Holding her to the sky and its quick blue,
Drowning the fever of her hands in sunlight.
She has no memory, nor fear, nor hope
Beyond the grass and shadows at her feet.
 
III: October-November
Indian-summer-sun
With crimson feathers whips away the mists,
Dives through the filter of trellises
And gilds the silver on the blotched arbor-seats.
Now gold and purple scintillate
On trees that seem dancing
In delirium;
Then the moon
In a mad orange flare
Floods the grape-hung night
 
IV: My Grandmother’s Love Letters
There are no stars tonight
But those of memory.
Yet how much room for memory there is
In the loose girdle of soft rain.
There is even room enough
For the letters of my mother's mother,
Elizabeth,
That have been pressed so long
Into a corner of the roof,
That they are brown and soft,
And liable to melt as snow.
Over the greatness of such space
Steps must be gentle.
It is all hung by an invisible white hair.
It trembles as birch limbs webbing the air.
And I ask myself:
“Are your fingers long enough to play
Old keys that are but echoes;
Is the silence strong enough
To carry back the music to its source
And back to you again,
As though to her?”
Yet I would lead my grandmother by the hand
Through much of what she would not understand;
And so I stumble, and the rain continues on the roof
With such a sound of gently pitying laughter.

Four Poems by Hart Crane (2024)

The composer writes: This composition was inspired by a conversation with a friend about sadness in music. He suggested several symphonic movements as candidates for the title  of "the saddest music in the world"; but I held firm to my conviction that the saddest music ever penned was the aria "When I am Laid," from Purcell's Dido and Aeneas.

I'm pleased to acknowledge that my setting of Oscar Wilde's poem Requiescat owes much to Purcell's "When I am Laid." Like Purcell's famous aria, my song is a "baroque" setting: a passacaglia, in a slow 3/4 metre. As well, my text – written by Wilde after the death of his sister, Isola, at the tender age of nine – is intensely tragic.

Performed by soprano Emily Klassen, violinist Rezan Onen-Lapointe, cellist Amahl Arulanandam, theorbist Benjamin Stein.

TEXT
(based on a poem by Oscar Wilde)

Lily-like, white as snow,
She hardly knew
She was a woman, so
Sweetly she grew.

Tread lightly, she is near
Under the snow,
Speak gently, she can hear
The daisies grow.

All her bright golden hair
Tarnished with rust,
She that was young and fair
Fallen to dust.

Coffin-board, heavy stone,
Lie on her breast,
I vex my heart alone
She is at rest.

Peace, Peace, she cannot hear
Lyre or sonnet,
All my life’s buried here,
Heap earth upon it.



Requiescat (2024)

Four movements; 2 violins, viola, cello; ca. 11 min.

The composer writes: I thought of the title Quartet of Dances before I began to write this four-movement work for string quartet. Sometimes I find myself trying to think of a name for a composition after I've written it – but on this occasion it occurred to me that beginning with this title would take me in new compositional directions. And I believe it did.
 
Usually, my starting-point for a composition is a melody. But there’s very little melody in the short movements of Quartet of Dances; rather, they are founded on rhythmic ideas. While there are no identifiable social dances to be heard – no waltzes, foxtrots or tangos – the rhythmic vitality of these pieces is intended to invoke the idea of dance in an abstract way.
 
As well, there is a playfulness about the title – with its double-meaning – that led me to consider other issues. As a result, my Quartet of Dances comes with its own built-in little manifesto: There is too much seriousness in contemporary music.

I claim no exemption from my own criticism, as some of my own works unabashedly strive for profundity and gravity. But in these dance movements, I have tried to inject some joie de vivre into new music.

Quartet of Dances (2004), 1st mvmnt

The composer writes: Concerning tuning, these pieces were composed in modern equal temperament. Other "well tempered" tuning systems designed for use in various keys should also produce good results. Also, these pieces were written for a single-manual instrument, without stops. However, it is possible that effects achievable on a two-manual instrument would be an artistically worthy addition to this music.

Two Fantasies for Harpsichord (2015)

The composer writes: My Three Paintings by Kandinsky (2023-2024) is an orchestral suite comprised of my three Kandinsky-inspired compositions: Contrasting Sounds (2024), Transverse Line (2024) and To the Sea and the Sun (2023).

Three Paintings by Kandinsky (2023-24)

This setting of Rossetti's poem is performed by the Houston Chamber Choir under the direction of Robert Simpson.

TEXT
In the bleak mid-winter, frosty wind made moan,
Earth stood hard as iron, water like a stone;
Snow had fallen, snow on snow, snow on snow,
In the bleak mid-winter, long ago.

Our God, Heaven cannot hold Him, nor earth sustain;
Heaven and earth shall flee away when He comes to reign.
In the bleak mid-winter a stable place sufficed
The Lord God Almighty, Jesus Christ.

Enough for Him, whom cherubim, worship night and day,
A breastful of milk, and a mangerful of hay;
Enough for Him, whom angels fall down before,
The ox and ass and camel which adore.

What can I give Him, poor as I am?
If I were a shepherd, I would bring a lamb;
If I were a Wise Man, I would do my part;
Yet what I can I give Him: give my heart.

In the Bleak Mid-Winter (1998)

This piece is based on Tennyson's poem "The Lotos-Eaters."

The performers are violinist Laurel Mascarenhas, cellist Karl Konrad Toews and pianist Timothy Minthorn.

Trio for Violin, Cello and Piano, "The Lotos-Eaters" (2000)

This is the opening movement of my Three Canzonas for Brass Quartet (1991). It is performed here by the Niagara Brass Ensemble.

“Allegro Marcato” from Three Canzonas for Brass Quartet (1991)

This is the second movement of my Two Poems by Walt Whitman (2017). It's given a fine performance here by the Pittsburgh Camerata, Mark Anderson conducting.

TEXT

Darest thou now, O Soul,
Walk out with me toward the Unknown Region,
Where neither ground is for the feet, nor any path to follow?
No map there, nor guide,
Nor voice sounding, nor touch of human hand,
Nor face with blooming flesh, nor lips, nor eyes, are in that land.
I know it not, O Soul;
Nor dost thou. All is a blank before us.
All waits, undream'd of, in that region, that inaccessible land.
Till, when the ties loosen,
All but the ties eternal, Time and Space,
Nor darkness, gravitation, sense, nor any bounds bound us.
Then we burst forth. We float,
In Time and Space, O Soul, prepared for them;
Equal, equipt at last (O joy! O Fruit of All!) them to fulfill,
O Soul!

Darest Thou Now, O Soul (2017)

Colin Eatock was born in Hamilton, Canada, in 1958, and began composing music as a teenager. He has written in a variety of media, composing works for solo instruments, voice, chamber ensembles, choir and orchestra. His works have been performed in North America and Europe by various ensembles, including Toronto’s Evergreen Club Contemporary Gamelan, Toronto's Canzona Players, Vancouver’s Erato Ensemble, Ottawa's Capital Chamber Choir and the Houston Chamber Choir, and have been recorded by the CentreDiscs, Toreador and Echiquier labels.

Colin Eatock

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