Premiere: 16 August 2008 at Christ the King Presbyterian Church, Cambridge, MA. Ronald Patrick, horn; Christine Patrick, piano
Duration: ca. 3′
Instrumentation: horn and piano
Performance Note: This Processional was written at the request of my then-fiance for our wedding in Cambridge, MA on 16 August 2008. It was first performed on that date by her aunt and uncle, Christine and Ronald Patrick. The following note appeared in the Order of Service:
The Processional for the bride is based on the tune of a song I wrote for Becca before we started dating in 2007. In rummaging through my Norton Anthology of Poetry, I came across an anonymous Jacobean poem that starts out with the text “There is a lady sweet and kind/Was never face so pleas’d my mind…” Naturally, the first (and only) face that occurred to me on reading that verse was Becca’s, so I quickly set the complete text and presented the song to her as a gift at a later date. Further, the opening and closing horn melody is one that is derived from the letters of her name: there’s a tradition (most famously utilized by J. S. Bach and Dmitri Shostakovich) of using German notation to spell out initials musically. In this instance I applied German and French scale spellings as follows: Re=D, B=B-flat, E=E, C=C, C=C, A=A.