Six Shelley Songs by Jason Thorpe Buchanan were composed in the summer of 2008. Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822) wrote these poems between 1814 and his unexpected death in 1822, when he drowned at sea. He is known for having been expelled from Oxford for distributing a pamphlet entitled "The Necessity of Atheism". He was married twice, leaving his first wife shortly after having written Away!, later meeting Mary Shelley, soon to be author of Frankenstein and daughter of William Godwin, a literary figure whom Shelley idolized. He lost two of the three children he had with Mary Shelley between 1818 and 1819. His texts have been criticized for their seemingly abstract surface aesthetic, as well as being called "splendidly nebulous". With these six songs I have attempted to capture the essence of Shelley's writing and depict the well-crafted romantic imagery contained in these poems. I hope that in doing so I manage to show their "splendidly nebulous" nature in my music.
your little voice...(2009) is a short song cycle based on three contrasting E.E. Cummings poems.
The outer movements, "your little voice..." and "love is more thicker than forget," were originally
scored for soprano and woodwinds in one of my earliest pieces, two e.e. cummings poems (2006).
They are here revised and arranged for piano at the request of Susanna Su, who premiered the
original settings. In addition to these movements, the middle of the cycle contains a setting of "a
wind has blown the rain away." Having been written almost five years after the other movements,
this setting is perhaps somewhat stylistically different from the rest; still the cycle still stands as a
unified set because of the inherent thematic similarities of the chosen texts.
In "your little voice/ Over the wires came leaping," Cummings is describing the hysteria of falling in
love. The musical setting of this text aims to reflect the poem?s many contrasting moods and
emotional trajectories which range from euphoric to chaotic to anxious to love-struck to reflective.
In "a wind has blown the rain away," Cummings describes the changing of the seasons and he
addresses the topics of love, death, and the passage of time. The music in the second movement is
written in different sections to respond to these themes, while a gusting wind in the piano constantly
resurfaces as a musical thread that ties the movement together. "Love is more thicker than forget,"
is comprised of four strophic stanzas that each describe love as perplexing and paradoxical. The
musical form reflects this construction: the soprano starts alone, and as each subsequent stanza
begins, the piano plays the same musical material which accompanied the prior stanza. Setting to
music Cummings's final image of the sky, the work ends reflectively on a gentle major chord. - D.T.
13'00" duration
Two performance scores: $24.95 Paper; $16.95 Digital
Catalogue No. 07009
