Songs of Love and Longing (2022)

Five songs for SATB chorus with harp accompaniment; composed for the King’s Chapel Choir (Boston) under the direction of Heinrich Christensen.

The cycle Songs of Love and Longing features poems by five different poets, each sharing a different perspective on love--from the kindling of new love, to the ache of longing and the pain of unrequited love, to the flame and passion of sensual desire.

The opening choral setting is of James Shirley’s wry poem On Her Dancing. My setting makes a musical nod to the galliard, an Elizabethan dance form popular in Shirley’s time. The next two poems form a natural sub-pairing within the cycle: The Taxi, written in 1914 by the Boston-area poet Amy Lowell, and a recently discovered untitled poem by the British poet Siegfried Sassoon, inserted as part of a love letter written in 1925. Lowell’s very modern poem is a stark depiction of the writer departing from her lover, full of jarring images from a drive across the city that pulls her away from the one she desperately desires. In contrast, Sassoon writes his gentle love sonnet from the perspective of the one who remains behind, warmly basking in the memory of the encounter that has just taken place. The last two poems in the cycle, by Emily Dickinson (Wild Nights) and Denise Levertov (Hymn to Eros), use passionate imagery to reflect on the more physical aspects of love. These two poems unequivocally invoke—even if they don’t literally state—sensual and erotic aspects of the encounter between humans.

Texts

1. On Her Dancing

I stood and saw my Mistress dance,
Silent, and with so fixed an eye,
Some might suppose me in a trance:
But being asked why,
By one who knew I was in love,
I could not but impart
My wonder, to behold her move
So nimbly with a marble heart.

James Shirley

2. The Taxi

When I go away from you
The world beats dead
Like a slackened drum.
I call out for you against the jutted stars
And shout into the ridges of the wind.
Streets coming fast,
One after the other,
Wedge you away from me,
And the lamps of the city prick my eyes
So that I can no longer see your face.
Why should I leave you,
To wound myself upon the sharp edges of the night?

Amy Lowell

3. Untitled Poem, October 24, 1925

Though you have left me, I’m not yet alone:
For what you were befriends the firelit room;
And what you said remains & is my own
To make a living gladness of my gloom
The firelight leaps & shows your empty chair
And all our harmonies of speech are stilled:
But you are with me in the voiceless air
My hands are empty, but my heart is filled.

Siegfried Sassoon

4. Wild Nights
(Book III, Love, XLIV)

Wild nights! Wild nights!
Were I with thee,
Wild nights should be
Our luxury!

Futile the winds
To a heart in port,—
Done with the compass,
Done with the chart.

Rowing in Eden!
Ah! the sea!
Might I but moor
To-night in thee!

Emily Dickinson

5. Hymn to Eros

O Eros, silently smiling one, hear me.
Let the shadow of thy wings
brush me.
Let thy presence
enfold me, as if darkness
were swandown.
Let me see that darkness
lamp in hand,
this country become
the other country
sacred to desire.

Drowsy god,
slow the wheels of my thought
so that I listen only
to the snowfall hush of
thy circling.
Close my beloved with me
in the smoke ring of thy power,
that we way be, each to the other,
figures of flame,
figures of smoke,
figures of flesh
newly seen in the dusk.

Denise Levertov