Departure (2004) - song cycle for high voice and piano
Commissioned by The Linden Duo

Listen Preview Score

Program notes:

The texts in Departure all spoke to me about the end of things – a day, the amorous years of one’s life, and life itself. In the first song The Hours Descend, the speaker depicts the passing of a day in the city. Yet even in the portrayal of daybreak, there are sad undertones in the poem. “The city wakes with a song upon her mouth having death in her eyes.” Even here, the speaker imparts the joy of dawn, but already forecasting the inevitable end to come. The poem goes on to say how “the world goes forth to murder dreams.” Throughout the text we see natural and metropolitan images side by side, and we end up yearning for nature, and scorn the chaos of the city. As day falls onto the residents of this city, the music becomes more agitated and raucous and shows the chaos and frustrations apparent in city life. We only regain tranquility musically when it is dark and “the city sleeps with death upon her mouth having a song in her eyes.” Here we’ve reached the point where we’re ready for the end, with only a memory of the song.

Lonely opens with an a cappella section. The singer, musing alone, finds herself in a state where she cannot remember the lovers in her life. This opening section is the singer thinking out loud, as she comes to grips with her faded passions. As she fully understands her thoughts, and is ready to share them with the audience, the piano begins, and helps her illustrate her acceptance of this. It is the saddest piece of the set, as the singer realizes that near the end of her life, she cannot remember the details, the individual days that are painted so vividly in the e. e. cummings text. She only remembers the feeling of joy that inhabited her for a while, but even that has now gone.

Remorse turns to full acceptance and triumph in If You Want Me Again. In this text, the last bit from Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, the speaker asserts control of a situation over which she has no control. She compares her passing to the currents of wind, and departs wildly and ecstatically. This is never more clearly illustrated than in the running triplet figures in the piano as the wind “coaxes me to the vapor and the dusk.” The speaker gives herself over to earth. Through death, she will escape the artificial, chaotic environment that we feel from the city in The Hours Descend.

Timothy C. Takach