This song was commissioned by the Source Song Festival for the opening concert of their fifth annual festival. A requirement of the commission was for the song to relate to Minnesota in some way. In this case, I have set the text of Minnesota poet Athena Kildegaard, whom I became aware of through accompanying her daughter, soprano Anika Kildegaard, at the piano.
The poem is an acrostic: the first letters of each line, read from top to bottom, spell a phrase from Emily Dickinson’s poem #219. It should be noted that an acrostic is a visual device: the reader of the poem perceives the acrostic through the same sense they use to experience the poem, which is what makes it effective. An aural acrostic is not experienced by the listener unless they have the score and are made aware of the process behind it ahead of time.
I wanted to reflect the acrostic in my setting, since it is the structural backbone of the poem. To do this, I ran the phrase “A Purple Ravelling” through a musical cipher, which assigns a letter of the musical alphabet to each letter of the Latin alphabet. Many composers have used ciphers throughout history; I chose to use Arthur Honegger’s cipher due to its inclusion of chromatic notes and for my personal bias of liking his music. I used the resultant pitches to set the first word or syllable of each line. These pitches reduce to a for perusal only seven-note set, which, in addition to opening and closing the piece, informs intervallic and motivic content throughout the work.
I could have chosen to use a cipher of my own devising, but decided not to, since I thought it was important to have an outside stricture controlling the setting, just as the Emily Dickinson poem controls Athena’s poem. Furthermore, this idea of a force outside of one’s control is present as the storm in the poem, which causes the narrator to enter a reverie of sorts.
The text consists of three sentences, alluding to the ternary form that so many songs utilize. I saw the first sentence as being thematically distinct from the second two, so my setting does not reflect ABA form but loosely resembles a recitative and aria. I chose to favor text painting and sonic imagery over trying to contort the poem into repetitive, tuneful phrases; I believe this best serves the mercurial nature of the original text.
Performance Notes
This setting contains many abrupt mood and tempo changes; these should be delivered in an organic manner—felt, rather than calculated. Minor deviations from the indicated tempi are expected and encouraged.
The pianist should pedal freely unless otherwise indicated.
