Night Songs

for bass-baritone and piano

Written: 2016-17
Duration: ca. 20'
Instrumentation: bass-baritone and piano
Commissioned by David Neal and made possible, in part, with funding from The Community Arts Partnership of Tompkins County
World Premiere: American Modern Ensemble, David Neal, Bass-Baritone, Geoffrey Burleson, Piano, Carnegie Hall, Weill Recital Hall, April 26, 2018
Publisher: Bill Holab Music

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PROGRAM NOTE

Night Songs is a song cycle consisting of settings of poems by different poets that reflect on various aspects of nighttime. The cycle is structured as a somewhat linear timeline, as if the songs are meditations by a single individual.

The cycle begins with a setting of City Dusk by F. Scott Fitzgerald, is a nostalgic exploration of the memories someone might have as he or she sits in the park at dusk. This person is in the park as the lights go down, and begins to feel sad, but remembers a time when this place wasn’t dark and lonely, but filled with lights, music, and people. He also remembers one specific person, a woman with blonde hair who loved to dance, who in this case, I interpreted as my wife Victoria. The second song, Lullaby, is a setting of the poem of the same name by W. H. Auden, and is a constructed as a love song sung to someone who is sleeping, and is about the inevitability of death, and looking after someone you love. In the third song, a setting of Birds Appearing in a Dream by Michael Collier, I use bird-like motivic patterns to provide structure for the colorful, figurative descriptions throughout Collier's text. The fourth song is a setting of Insomnia by Dana Gioia. In this poem, the narrator is full of regret, and finally realizes the value of people over possessions. The final song, a setting of Flying at Night by Ted Kooser, is a poem that is all at once about what the title suggests, but also about how so much of what we experience is interconnected and tied together by light.

Night Songs was commissioned by David Neal and made possible, in part, with funding from The Community Arts Partnership of Tompkins County.

  • Night Songs
    for bass-baritone and piano

    I. City Dusk

    Come out…. out
    To this inevitable night of mine
    Oh you drinker of new wine,
    Here’s pageantry… Here’s carnival,
    Rich dusk, dim streets and all
    The whispering of city night…
    I have closed my book of fading harmonies,
    (The shadows fell across me in the park)
    And my soul was sad with violins and trees,
    And I was sick for dark,
    When suddenly it hastened by me, bringing
    Thousands of lights, a haunting breeze,
    And a night of streets and singing…
    I shall know you by your eager feet,
    And by your pale, pale hair;
    I’ll whisper happy incoherent things
    While I’m waiting for you there…
    All the faces unforgettable in dusk
    Will blend to yours,
    And the footsteps like a thousand overtures
    Will blend to yours,
    And there will be more drunkenness than wine
    In the softness of your eyes on mine…
    Faint violins where lovely ladies dine,
    The brushing of skirts, the voices of the night
    And all the lure of friendly eyes… Ah there
    We’ll drift like summer sounds upon the summer air…

    — F. Scott Fitzgerald

    “City Dusk” originally printed in Nassau Literary Magazine, April 1918. In the public domain.

    II. Lullaby

    Lay your sleeping head, my love,
    Human on my faithless arm;
    Time and fevers burn away
    Individual beauty from
    Thoughtful children, and the grave
    Proves the child ephemeral:
    But in my arms till break of day
    Let the living creature lie,
    Mortal, guilty, but to me
    The entirely beautiful.

    Soul and body have no bounds:
    To lovers as they lie upon
    Her tolerant enchanted slope
    In their ordinary swoon,
    Grave the vision Venus sends
    Of supernatural sympathy,
    Universal love and hope;
    While an abstract insight wakes
    Among the glaciers and the rocks
    The hermit’s carnal ecstasy.

    Certainty, fidelity
    On the stroke of midnight pass
    Like vibrations of a bell
    And fashionable madmen raise
    Their pedantic boring cry;
    Every farthing of the cost,
    All the dreaded cards foretell,
    Shall be paid, but from this night
    Not a whisper, not a thought,
    Not a kiss nor look be lost.

    Beauty, midnight, vision dies:
    Let the winds of dawn that blow
    Softly round your dreaming head
    Such a day of welcome show
    Eye and knocking heart may bless,
    Find the mortal world enough;
    Noons of dryness find you fed
    By the involuntary powers,
    Nights of insult let you pass
    Watched by every human love.

    — W.H. Auden

    “Lullaby” by W.H. Auden. Used by permission of Curtis Brown, Ltd. Copyright © 1940. All Rights reserved.

    III. Birds Appearing in a Dream

    One had feathers like a blood-streaked koi,
    another a tail of color-coded wires.
    One was a blackbird stretching orchid wings,
    another a flicker with a wounded head.

    All flew like leaves fluttering to escape,
    bright, circulating in burning air,
    and all returned when the air cleared.
    One was a kingfisher trapped in its bower,

    deep in the ground, miles from water.
    Everything is real and everything isn’t.
    Some had names and some didn’t.
    Named and nameless shapes of birds,

    at night my hand can touch your feathers
    and then I wipe the vernix from your wings,
    you who have made bright things from shadows,
    you who have crossed the distances to roost in me.

    — Michael Collier

    “Birds Appearing in a Dream” from Dark Wild Realm: Poems by Michael Collier. Copyright © 2006 by Michael Collier. Used by permission of Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.

    IV. Insomnia

    Now you hear what the house has to say.
    Pipes clanking, water running in the dark,
    the mortgaged walls shifting in discomfort,
    and voices mounting in an endless drone
    of small complaints like the sounds of a family
    that year by year you’ve learned how to ignore.

    But now you must listen to the things you own,
    all that you’ve worked for these past years.
    the murmur of property, of things in disrepair,
    the moving parts about to come undone,
    and twisting in the sheets remember all
    the faces you could not bring yourself to love.

    How many voices have escaped you until now,
    the venting furnace, the floorboards underfoot,
    the steady accusations of the clock
    numbering the minutes no one will mark.
    The terrible clarity this moment brings.
    the useless insight, the unbroken dark.

    — Dana Gioia

    “Insomnia” from the book Daily Horoscope: Poems by Dana Gioia (Graywolf Press, 1986). Copyright © 1986 by Dana Gioia. Used by permission of Dana Gioia.

    V. Flying at Night

    Above us, stars. Beneath us, constellations.
    Five billion miles away, a galaxy dies
    like a snowflake falling on water. Below us,
    some farmer, feeling the chill of that distant death,
    snaps on his yard light, drawing his sheds and barn
    back into the little system of his care.
    All night, the cities, like shimmering novas,
    tug with bright streets at lonely lights like his.

    — Ted Kooser

    Lyrics from the poem “Flying at Night” from the book Flying at Night: Poems 1965-1985, by Ted Kooser, Copyright © 2005. All rights controlled by the University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh, PA 15260. Used by permission of University of Pittsburgh Press.