The Song in the Air

Composer's Notes

I was in the early stages of writing this commission when I was surprised to discover myself in the grip of a passacaglia!  The subject for this passacaglia emerged from the bass notes of the opening allegro section, which was written first, inspired by the flight of an arrow and a song.  This subject continued to develop into a 12-tone theme – something I had always thought best left to the Viennese School.

Why a passacaglia I asked myself. Wasn’t composing difficult enough? It’s a strange phenomenon that often I don’t know why I do certain things as a composer until the piece is mostly written and I have a chance to sit back and take a good look at it. This might be the musical equivalent of authors creating characters who in turn begin talking for themselves, with little heed for their creator’s original intentions. I realized that the combination of these two poems represented a major change and development in the life of the poet, although it’s still the same poet at the end as at the beginning of his journey.  Likewise, with a passacaglia, although many variations and changes and indeed development may take place, the theme remains the same.  And I suppose at a stretch you might say that since the poet in this case covers as much psychological ground as might be realistically possible for one human – from youthful joy and confidence to doubt, regret and despair, to reconciliation, and finally to the discovery of love – I needed to have the theme for this passacaglia cover as much musical ground as possible. Hence the 12-tone business, since at least in western music that’s all we’ve got.

So this cover-all theme ended up in the voices as the mysterious opening of the piece and was used in its simplest form for the most critical part of the text, “Long, long afterward, in an oak/I found the arrow, still unbroke.”

One of the difficulties I had in setting the submitted text, Longfellow’s poem “The Arrow and the Song”, was what to do between the second and third/last stanzas.  Something needed to happen between the time the arrow and the song fell to earth and their rediscovery “long, long afterward”.  I couldn’t tell the choir (and the audience) to go out for coffee, while sufficient time passed to make sense of the poet’s wonder at recovering the arrow, and more profoundly, the song. I needed more text, and not just any text, but preferably something that would address what happened to the poet in the meantime. I came upon another poem by Longfellow called “Loss and Gain”, which very handily mentions the arrow again. “How like an arrow the good intent/Has fallen short or been turned aside.” The first two stanzas of this poem are so regretful, that they could only be written by an older man. And the last stanza with its lines “Defeat may be victory in disguise;/The lowest ebb is the turn of the tide”, although hopeful, certainly doesn’t express the youthful exuberance of the first two stanzas of “The Arrow and the Song”.  Clearly the poet has matured.  The passacaglia theme worked well here as the rather somber and persistent basso continuo over which the voices express the doubt, regret and then hope, through which the poet had to pass in order to find his arrow and his song.

The poet also finds his more youthful voice when he finds his song “from beginning to end….in the heart of a friend”. So the piece returns to the form of the passacaglia at the opening allegro, “from beginning to end”, but then speeds up the pace of the theme for the final statement, suggesting the rushing forward of the poet into the arms of his friend.  I considered a kind of trailing off ending for the piece but thought better of it when I realized how celebratory the last impressions needed to be for the 50th anniversary of The Ottawa Children’s Choir.

I don’t know of any passacaglias written for children’s choirs, but it might be appropriate that The Ottawa Children’s Choir in my home town should be the recipient of the first one. The choir members might find it entertaining to identify all the iterations of the passacaglia subject, unless they have something better to do …going outside and skating on the canal for example.