Premiere: 26 April 2009 at Gordon College, Wenham, MA
Jan Zimmerman, mezzo-soprano; Michael Monroe, piano
Duration: 15’
Instrumentation: voice and piano
Performance Note:
“To Anacreon in Heaven…” is a set of five drinking songs that were written between September 2006 and August 2007, then slightly revised before the first performance in April 2009. The piece was composed for my friend, the mezzo-soprano Jan Zimmerman, who shares with me an appreciation for European libations.
When I set out to write the piece, I determined that I wanted it to contain both original music and arrangements. Accordingly, the cycle features two adaptations of rather well-known tunes: the GAUDEAMUS IGITUR and “The Anacreontic Song” (from whence the work derives its title).
The brief opening movement (setting William Butler Yeats’ “A Drinking Song”) is—so far as I’m aware—the only instance of a purposefully atonal, solo drinking song yet written. Three verses from the GAUDEAMUS IGITUR follow in lusty (and tonal) Germanic style. After that comes a tripping setting of Hilaire Belloc’s delightful “On the Excellence of Burgundy Wine.”
For the fourth movement, I arranged “The Anacreontic Song.” Its melody (which eventually emerges clearly in this rendition) is famous as the national anthem of the United States and the vocal part eventually culminates on a Dodger Stadium-worthy high B-flat, though the way it gets there—primarily via awkwardly forced direct modulations—is nothing that good students of harmony and voice leading should seek to emulate.
Like the third movement, the finale is a waltz, though this time slowed down to an appropriately reflective tempo. Jan and I compiled the text, which is simply a list of favorite beverages we have each discovered in the course of our travels. Throughout this song, too, allusions to various favorite waltzes of mine (from Strauss’s Elektra to Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker) crop up, as to references to a couple of gospel hymns that I’ve always felt would have done well in a 19th-century dance hall.
“To Anacreon in Heaven…” is dedicated to Jan and my drinking buddy (and fellow composer), Winton White.