Vocal/Choral Works

I Have a Star!

“Midway through life’s journey,” writes Dante at the beginning of the Inferno, “I found myself in a dark wood.”  The rest of his Divina Commedia recounts his journey out of that spiritual wilderness.  In Dante’s day life’s midpoint would have been around age 30; in the modern world we would probably place it somewhere in one’s mid-thirties.

The darkest point of my life was one night around 1983-1984, when I was in my mid-thirties.  That night, when I was desperately struggling to find a way to keep on living, I wrote a little poem, titled “I Have a Star.”

From the earliest days I can remember, my life was centered on thoughts, feelings, and goals that arose, not from my social environment, but from deep within me.  My interests were personal, often esoteric, rarely shared with others, and pursued with an almost autistic intensity.  I always seemed to be happiest when I was engrossed in self-generated, self-guided activities, expeditions into territories known only to me, undertaken without concern about the judgments of others.  At most, I might occasionally share the final product of those journeys, as in a piano performance.

But as I became an adolescent and then a young man, I became increasingly concerned, like others of that age, about how my peers saw me and how I could fit into the social fabric.  As I sought social acceptance, I experienced repeated and severe disappointments, ironically becoming more and more aware of the gulf between myself and others, feeling more and more isolated and alone.  In making my self-esteem dependent on perceptions of others, I was destroying myself.  On that night, I vowed to return again to the inner light that had guided me from the beginning of my life, and that was to guide me in all the decades that followed. The poem reflects that vow.

I never fancied myself a great poet, but what my poem may lack in literary sophistication and refinement, I believe, is compensated by its honesty.  The poem was initially intended just for myself, and until about a year ago, I never revealed to anyone how I came to write it.

About a year after writing the poem, I was directing an amateur mixed (SATB) chorus in Atlanta.  (I had started out as their accompanist, but after they lost their director, I got drafted for the director position and hastily taught myself how to do it.)  The chorus was not very advanced, with some of the singers barely able to read music, but there was in particular one soprano with a very good natural voice, so in March 1985 I decided to convert my poem into a work for soprano solo, mixed chorus, and piano.

We rehearsed the work a few times, but for long-forgotten reasons never performed it, and the chorus itself eventually dissolved.  Nevertheless, the song had a beautiful, haunting melody and pleasing harmonies, which fit the words very well, and it had a flavor that I believed would resonate well with audiences, even among many who may not be fans of classical music.  Consequently, I pondered over the years what to do about it with no vocalists available.

Then in July 2016, I made the acquaintance of a very good soprano, with a strong, well-trained voice.  A few days after hearing her, it occurred to me that the work would be very well suited not only to her voice, but also to her personality.  No chorus was available, but I could use a string quartet to cover some of the missing melodic lines and harmonies.  So last fall I transcribed the work for soprano solo, strings, and piano.  The new version was transposed from F major to G major in order to put the soprano and the strings in a better range and key, and the string parts were modified to make them more idiomatic to the instruments.

We  gathered the singer, pianist, and string players together, and a couple of months ago (in September 2017) they realized the whole work in rehearsal.  All of them are enthusiastic about this dramatically effective, emotionally charged work, and they are eager to present its premiere in January.

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