Australian Music Centre | Breaking sound barriers

Work Overview

A song cycle centered on poetry, based on omnipresent sentiments of death, grief and loss. The text has been drawn from a selection of poetry that spans centuries and the globe, including tenth-century Japanese poet Izumi Shikibu, nineteenth-century English poet John Keats, American writer Walt Whitman, Irish poet William Butler Yeats, French novelist Marcel Proust, American poet Sara Teasdale, and further into the twentieth-century with American writer e. e. cummings, Welsh poet and writer Dylan Thomas, to contemporary Australian poet, dancer and filmmaker Richard James Allen.

"Meditating on a beautiful expression of sadness can help to provide a thoroughly uplifting sense of consolation". [Robert White from the liner notes of John Dowland's 'In Darkness Let Me Dwell'].

Work Details

Year: 2016

Instrumentation: Male & female voice, tenor saxophone/bass clarinet, guitar (acoustic & electric), piano.

Duration: 55 min.

Difficulty: Medium

Contents note: 1. Listen listen (text by Izumi Shikibu) -- 2. finis (text by e e cummings) -- 3. When I have fears that I may cease to be (text by John Keats) -- 4. So tired of having suffered (text by Proust) -- 5. Where my books go (text by W.B. Yeats) -- 6. Do not go gentle into that good night (text by Dylan Thomas) -- 7. Listen (instrumental reprise) -- 8. The night (text by Richard James Allan) -- 9. Darest thou now O soul (text by Walt Whitman) -- 10. If death is kind (text by Sara Teasdale) -- 11. i am a little church (text by e e cummings).

This project has been assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council for the Arts, its arts funding and advisory body. This project is supported by the Victorian Government through Creative Victoria.

Analysis

Resonate article: 2017 Art Music Awards finalists: comments by judging panels by Australian Music Centre