Blog: News and Views

Stephen Smith's Thoughts on Pensive on Her Dead Gazing

September 19, 2006

I received the commission last winter for a Remembrance Day piece, so I turned to my favourite poet (and a favourite among composers generally for setting to music), Walt Whitman, whose experiences working as a battlefield wound-dresser in the American Civil War resulted in numerous beautiful and heart-wrenching poems. Diane already had a title and a theme for the concert, and we both agreed that Whitman's poem, "Pensive on Her Dead Gazing" perfectly expressed that theme - the idea that a soldier's (or anyone's) death is not an end, and not a waste, but that the departed person's spirit somehow becomes part of the very fabric of the earth, a gift to humanity for generations to come.

In the poem, Mother Earth is pictured stalking through a battlefield strewn with slain soldiers, and calling upon the rivers, the forests, and the soil to absorb the essence of each of her "dear children," storing it like a rich treasure to be yielded up "centuries hence."

I set the poem in four sections: introduction, litany, incantation, and lullaby - each section having a slightly different musical style and texture, and moving from C-sharp minor (a dark, brooding key) to D-flat major (a key which I've always felt has a comforting, maternal quality). The piece calls for the choir to sing with an expressive legato, to tune dissonances beautifully, and to produce the full range of dynamics (particularly to sing with intensity very softly) - all things which Chor Leoni does superbly. When writing the final passage in particular, I could really hear Chor Leoni's shimmering soft sound in my mind's ear.

Posted by Stephen Smith on September 19, 2006 at 2:45 PM
Filed in: Performances | Permanent Link

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