Tone Poem: “My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains my sense” (2016)
Keat’s poem “Ode to a Nightingale” served as the inspiration for this piece. Rather than text painting, the piece follows the poem’s progression of mood: a vague, existential longing, a fantastical nighttime journey away from reality, and a sudden return to the melancholic real world. Marking a significant departure from the musical styles I usually employ, this piece is a fun compositional challenge that incorporates stylistic currents of the early 20th century, drawing from composers as wide-ranging as Stravinsky, Debussy, Mahler, Weill, and Lehar.
The form of the piece is episodic, juxtaposing disparate styles in the tradition of Mahler. We first hear the unusual low growling of four solo double basses, on top of which a solo bassoon sings a plaintive rhapsody, a la Stravinsky’s Firebird. This is contrasted with diaphanous, impressionistic passages for full orchestra, culminating in a thunderous tutti. The tutti fades as the register falls, and the music seems to burrow itself into the earth in an abrupt stop. Then suddenly we find ourselves in the “realm of the night”—a solo cello plays a sort of Weimar era Cabaret tune reminiscent of Kurt Weill, which is accompanied by timpani and flutes and ironic commentary in the muted brass. The party is enlivened, as the entire orchestra plunges into a somewhat distorted Viennese Waltz suggestive of Lehar’s The Merry Widow. As this climaxes, an eerie sound, that of the cymbal played on timpani with pedal glissando, takes as back to the musical world of the opening.