American Pastoral Songs
Written with fellowship support from the Brevard Music Center
Instrumentation Tenor and Piano
Duration 10'
Movements
I. I Taste a Liquor Never Brewed (Dickinson)
II. After the Dazzle of Day (Whitman)
III. Fragmentary Blue (Frost)
IV. Afterglow (Fenimore Cooper, Jr.)
Program Notes
My American Pastoral Songs were composed off-and-on at the New England Conservatory and the Brevard Music Center between 2009-2011. They reflect a strong affinity I had at that time for exploring American musical tropes and cultural themes in my work. Setting different 19th and 20th-Century American poems about nature's beauty and mystery, the cycle combines my fondness for American writers with my love of America's diverse natural landscapes.
In "I Taste a Liquor Never Brewed" (Dickinson), the music is sometimes pensive, sometimes frolicking, responding to Dickinson's warmth and charm in her depiction of plants, insects, and birds. In "Fragmentary Blue" (Frost), the slow, lilting, rhythms suggest a curious child turning over rocks and branches in a forest, in search of instances of “deep blue” that mirror the hue of the heavenly sky above. Meanwhile, in both "After the Dazzle of Day" (Whitman) and "Afterglow" (Fenimore Cooper, Jr.), I have tried to capture the tranquility and beauty of sunset, a time when all in nature seems to come gently to rest.
- Daniel Temkin
The following texts are used in this work:
Emily Dickinson (ca. 1860)
I Taste a Liquor Never Brewed
I taste a liquor never brewed,
From tankards scooped in pearl;
Not all the vats upon the Rhine
Yield such an alcohol!
Inebriate of air am I,
And debauchee of dew,
Reeling, through endless summer days,
From inns of molten blue.
When landlords turn the drunken bee
Out of the foxglove's door,
When butterflies renounce their drams,
I shall but drink the more!
Till seraphs swing their snowy hats,
And saints to windows run,
To see the little tippler
Leaning against the sun!
Walt Whitman (1888)
After the Dazzle of Day – from Leaves of Grass
After the dazzle of day is gone,
Only the dark, dark night shows to my eyes the stars;
After the clangor of organ majestic, or chorus, or perfect band,
Silent, athwart my soul, moves the symphony true.
James Fenimore Cooper, Jr. (1918)
Afterglow
At the quiet close of day
Gently yet the willows sway;
When the sunset light is low,
Lingers still the afterglow.
Beauty tarries loth to die,
Every lightest fantasy
Lovelier grows in memory,
Where the truer beauties lie.
Robert Frost (1920)
Fragmentary Blue
Why make so much of fragmentary blue
In here and there a bird, or butterfly,
Or flower, or wearing-stone, or open eye, When heaven presents in sheets the solid hue?
Since earth is earth, perhaps, not heaven (as yet)--
Though some savants make earth include the sky;
And blue so far above us comes so high,
It only gives our wish for blue a whet.
All poems are in the public domain.
Copyright © 2020 of Daniel Temkin Music (BMI), All Rights Reserved.