The Voices Of The City

The voices of the city - merged and swelled
Into a mighty dissonance of sound,
And from the medley rose these broken strains
 In changing time and ever-changing keys.

I.
Pleasure seekers, silken clad,
Led by cherub Day,
Ours the duty to be glad,
Ours the toil of play.

Sleep has bound the commonplace,
Pleasure rules the dawn.
Small hours set the merry pace
  And we follow on.

We must use the joys of earth,
All its cares we'll keep;
Night was made for youth and mirth,
Day was made for sleep.

Time has cut his beard, and lo!
He is but a boy,
Singing, on with him we go,
Ah! but life is joy.

II.
We are the vendors of beauty,
We the purveyors for hell;
The carnal bliss of a purchased kiss
And the pleasures that blight, we sell.
God pity us; God pity the world.

We are the sad race-victims
Of the misused force in man,
Of the great white flame burned black with shame
And lost to the primal plan.
God pity us; God pity the world.

We are the Purpose of Being
Gone wrong in the thought of the world.
The torch for its hand made a danger brand
  And into the darkness hurled.
God pity us; God pity the world.

“The Voices of the City” was the winner of the “Maria Jette Sings Your World Premiere” for Source’s 2017 OpenSource concert: At the Headwaters. It was premiered on August 7th, 2017 at Sundin Music Hall, St. Paul, MN by Maria Jette, soprano and Mary Jo Gothmann, piano

Jonathan Posthuma (b. 1989)  is a freelance composer in Saint Paul, Minnesota. His musical style seeks to combine lyricism, evocative imagery, and intense emotional contrasts, yet maintains clarity in form and function at their deepest levels.

He recently received his Masters in Music Composition from the University of Wisconsin – Madison, where he studied with Stephen Dembski and Laura Schwendinger. His orchestral work, Fili di Perle received 3rd Prize in the Karol Szymanowski International Composers Competition in Katowice, Poland and was premiered in March 2016. As part of his degree requirement, Jonathan composed and recorded, The God of Material Things, a song cycle for narrator, soloist, chorus, and orchestra, which sets the poetry of David Schelhaas, professor emeritus of Dordt University, where Jonathan studied composition privately with Luke Dahn while completing his Bachelors in Music Education.

Other recent large ensemble works include An Isthmus Aubade, dedicated to Scott Teeple and the UW-Madison Wind Ensemble and premiered in April 2015 and Concerto Grosso No. 1 for strings, percussion, and piano, commissioned and premiered by the Madison Area Youth Orchestra and Clocks in Motion in June 2015. In August 2017, he participated in the International Workshop of Orchestral Composition at the Federal University of Paraná, where the scherzo from his Chamber Symphony “Beams of Heaven” was premiered by the student orchestra. Among his other awards are 2011 BMI Student Composer Award for Five Studies for Piano: Two Pencils and a Hymnbook and an award for sound design from the Kennedy Center American College Theatre Festival for his incidental music for The Glass Menagerie.

​Jonathan is an active member of the Twin Cities choral community and has sung with VocalEssence Chorus, Kantorei, and impulse (MPLS). Several of his choral works have received premieres by these ensembles, including two composed for VocalEssence as part of their ReMix program, designed for emerging composers of choral music, which were premiered at the ACDA National Festival in March 2017 and at Minnesota’s ACDA Festival in November 2017. Recently, he was selected as a participant for the inaugural Mostly Modern Festival, where selections from Paul Klee: Painted Songs, an ongoing collection of chamber works inspired by the visual art of Paul Klee were premiered in addition to a performance of two movements from his Chamber Symphony with the American Modern Orchestra. Jonathan also works in the Development office of The Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra.

www.jonathanposthuma.com

Prolific poet and journalist Ella Wheeler Wilcox was born in Johnstown, Wisconsin. As a teenager, she published poems in the Waverly Magazine and Leslie’s Weekly. She studied at the University of Wisconsin, but left after just a year to focus on her writing. Wilcox’s essays appeared widely in magazines such as Cosmopolitan, and she wrote popular poetry, generally in plain, rhyming verse. She published her first book, Drops of Water (1872), when she was 22 years old. 60,000 copies of her book Poems of Passion (1883) were sold over the course of just two years. Her other poetry collections include Poems of Experience (1910), Poems of Peace (1906), and Shells (1873).

Wilcox also published books of fiction, including A Woman of the World (1904), Sweet Danger (1892), A Double Life (1890), and Mal Moulée (1885), and two autobiographies, The Worlds and I (1918) and The Story of a Literary Career (1905).

She died on October 30, 1919 at her home in Short Beach, Connecticut
(www.poetryfoundation.org)