Duration: 40′
Instrumentation: baritone and piano
Performance note: Mémoriale is a setting of five poems that meditate, principally, on mortality, loss, and the passage of time. They were written in response to a series of events – a death, medical diagnosis, and serious injury – that visited members of my extended family over the first half of 2016. However, the themes of the texts are universal, a point that was hammered home many times over the months I spent completing and orchestrating the songs.
Mémoriale is bookended by a pair of Shakespeare sonnets – nos. 12 and 146 – in between which come short poems by John Donne (A Valediction: of Weeping) and Alfred, Lord Tennyson (Tears, Idle Tears), plus William Butler Yeats’ massive In Memory of Major Robert Gregory. The latter forms the emotional core of the piece, a shattering reminiscence of a life cut far too short.
Setting five poems on such sober topics presented a series of challenges that I endeavored to overcome mainly through structural and tonal variety. Both sonnets are basically through-composed, while the Donne poem lent itself surprisingly well to a modified bar form (an AAB pattern that might be familiar from most Bach chorales). Only the Tennyson is essentially strophic.
The Yeats, with its enormous scope, shifting moods, and sometimes prose-like verse, offered its own set of difficulties. I approached its setting as though I were writing an independent cantata or operatic scene, which, in turn, resulted in a singular form that tightly reflects the poem’s construct. Lasting around twenty minutes, this is both Mémoriale’s biggest movement and the longest single piece I’ve written to date.
Several devices lend further unity to this sprawling score, among them a theme derived from a corruption of Westminster Chimes (heard prominently in the sonnets – it’s actually the music that opens the song cycle) and the use of gaping, empty spaces (modelled on those employed so memorably and effectively by Mahler in the last movement of his Ninth Symphony). Mémoriale’s harmonic language is widely varied, ranging from densely chromatic to tonal.
Though focusing on death, Mémoriale is ultimately music about life: a reminder of its transience and that each day is, indeed, a gift.