Untraveled Worlds
SATB choral/piano score
PEL2025-Choir and Piano
SSA choral/piano score
PEL2025-Choir and Piano
Instrumental Parts
PEL2025-IP
A WORK FOR SATB AND/OR SSA CHOIR AND PIANO WITH OPTIONAL SOLO VIOLIN, PERCUSSION, DRUMS, BASS, ORGAN
'Untraveled Worlds' by Paul Halley (SATB and/or SSA and piano, optional solo violin, percussion, drums, bass, and organ) is a prominent festival work with text from Tennyson’s “Ulysses”. A dramatic, heroic setting of an inspiring text, with music that is innovative, affirmative and accessible. And, a fabulous violin solo - part Celtic, part global, entirely exciting.
Commissioned by Bruce Fifer and Collegium Musicum of Taft School for Commencement, May 25, 2000
Video
Texts
Untraveled Worlds
Words: Alfred, Lord Tennyson
I cannot rest from travel; I will drink
Life to the lees. All times I have enjoyed
Greatly, have suffered greatly, both with those
That loved me, and alone.
I am a part of all that I have met;
Yet all experience is an arch wherethrough
Gleams the untraveled world whose margin fades
For ever and for ever when I move.
How dull it is to pause, to make an end,
To rust unburnished, not to shine in use!
As though to breathe were life! Life piled on life
Were all too little, and of one to me
Little remains; but every hour is saved
From that eternal silence, something more,
A bringer of new things; and vile it were
For some three suns to store and hoard myself,
And this gray spirit yearning in desire
To follow knowledge like a sinking star,
Beyond the utmost bound of human thought.
Come, my friends,
‘Tis not too late to seek a newer world.
Push off, and sitting well in order smite
The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
Of all the western stars, until I die.
Though much is taken, much abides; and though
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are,
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield!
text from “Ulysses” by Alfred Lord Tennyson
Reviews
“The sound of the full chorus just wraps around you like angel wings and lifts one’s spirits to a higher level.” – Bonnie Beth Derby, Producer/host “Choral Traditions” WCNY-FM
"The title and theme are from the text of Tennyson’s “Ulysses”: '…all experience is an arch wherethrough / Gleams that untraveled world whose margin fades / For ever and for ever when I move'. The work becomes a meditation on human longing and the mystical experience of alternative realities. For harried souls in troubled times, “Untraveled Worlds” offers a room with a panoramic view of images beckoning from beyond the scope of everyday experience.”
- Jennifer Kolmes, The American Organist Magazine
