Come, my dark eyed one

For a composer, to be commissioned to write a companion work for the Brahms Requiem is the equivalent of charging a visual artist to create a canvass that will hang in tandem with the Mona Lisa.  In addition to that universal challenge, being asked to compose a work for the first major ensemble with which one worked, in the city in which one was trained and being performed by colleagues and friends sets up a myriad of personal expectations and challenges.  Thus, the process of sitting down to begin putting pen to paper with this work was one filled with this overwhelming combination of excitement and dread!

Although the programmatic pairing with the Brahms could be taken simply as a technical connection of shared instrumentation, it became important through the compositional process that Come My Dark Eyed One lead into the Requiem in a coherent arch.  Therefore, it was necessary that the subject matter of this new work share the down-to-earth humanity of the German Requiem and not be a work mired in mysticism – matching neither Orthodox nor Catholic Christian sentiment, but a more “Protestant” verisimilitude.  Thus, the choice was made for a secular subject matter without specific dramatic intent, but rather a series of poems that could create a scrapbook of vignettes that reference the life and death of two lovers.

To not be “dramatic” means that the sense of time and timing is lost in this work – characters can be in different dimensions simultaneously at any given time – two souls somewhere between life and death searching for meaning and resolution and asking the question “does love end after death?”  Even in the canonic duet of the 6th movement, it is not clear who is alive, who is dead, who is remembering an experience, who is having the experience in real time, if the characters are together or separated by dimensions and time.  Indeed, while composing it became clear to me that this wasn’t a requiem for one or other of the lovers, but that it was a timeless story, and that both characters could be ghosts, or that both characters could be very much alive projecting their life experience into some future uncertainty.

My grandmother, whose husband had passed away when my father was only 3 years old, used to tell me a story of how the thirty-plus years without her husband were filled with moments of her sensing his presence with her, actually feeling the blow of his breath on the back of her neck and often, and commonly sensing his aura with her.  They had conversations together, one of which I witnessed at his gravesite when I was a young child.  It is this kind of life-connection–verging-on-ghost story that underpins the thematic and textual structure of Come My Dark Eyed One. 

The musical work itself is structured in a circular fashion taking the 5th movement as the axis of symmetry.  The work begins with a short invocation and follows into a three movement symmetrical structure exploring sexuality, romance and sentiment, with the 2nd and 4th solo movements surrounding an energetic post-minimalistic 3rd movement.  Similarly, movements 6,7 and 8 share a symmetrical relationship, surrounding the 7th movement – a striking statement made by the chorus a cappella.  Thus formalistically and architecturally there are the paired structures of: movements 2 and 4, 6 and 8 and 3, 5 and 7.  This allows for a very clear musical form that allows the textual ambivalence to be supported.

The language of the score continues my eclectic understanding of post-Bernstein America, which is the logical musical vocabulary of a Greek-Mexican-Hungarian-German, half Jew, half Catholic, born-in-Hollywood, grew-up-in-New York City, Anglican boy chorister, formally trained in Boston, protégé of Lukas Foss, thirty-something composer!  One then expects to find driving pulse, mixed meter, modes of limited transposition, aleatoric gestures, overtly tonal melodic structures, references to Jazz and the Blues, large-scale orchestration, and harmonies that have become known as “American.”  All of these sounds are there, with the intention that the collage of the component parts do make a unified whole: a statement that is clear and emotionally intact.  A work that perhaps has elements of derivative familiarity – but in a manner where the successful synthesis of stylistic variety becomes the objective.

Come My Dark Eyed One is probably the last work I will complete while still in my thirties and in many ways this piece already feels like a milestone, or marker for me.  In this highly prolific decade that has seen the composition of 2 operas, 2 concertos, several other orchestral works, dozens of choral compositions and arrangements, in addition to the publication of my complete output by E. C. Schirmer – with this work I sense the culmination of this period of wild activity and the shifting into a new level of my development as an artist.  It seems fitting that this shift would be sparked by the catalystic commission of my friends in Boston!  It is therefore with great love and gratitude that I give this work to the Back Bay Chorale and its dynamic 5th music director, Scott Allen Jarrett. 

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