Piece of the Week 93:  Music always round me

For many years I taught in a busy music department – and there was music all around me! A soprano in one practice room, a tuba player in another – an orchestra in the main hall and a rock band in a portacabin outside. And I thought of that music department  when I read the poem by the nineteenth-century American poet Walt Whitman (pictured), That music always round me, on which this piece is based. It’s a great poem about the power of music, and the joy of communal music-making, and is written in Whitman’s typically forthright way.

If you’ve played in an orchestra or sung in the choir you will know how the music often comes at you in all directions, and I just took a few lines from Whitman’s poem and developed them a little to try and communicate that feeling of being surrounded by music. Whitman’s poem is particularly focused on choral music, and he had nice lines describing the tenors (‘strong, ascending, with glad notes of daybreak’), sopranos (‘sailing buoyantly among the waves’), basses (‘shuddering lustily through the universe’), but nothing for the altos! So I added an alto line (‘warmly blending in richness, with vibrant sonority’).  Then, later, Whitman writes of the voices ‘working, breathing together in harmony’ – and again for my purposes I couldn’t resist adding ‘breathing, thinking together in unison’ and then ‘working together, divisi’! So at the end of the day the music’s direction rather overtook Whitman’s original poem and I hope he’s not seething in his grave…

Music always round me is a movement from my cantata Endless Song, but it’s also available separately. It was originally written with a string quartet/quintet accompaniment but can equally well be accompanied by piano. Endless Song is a five movement cantata about the power of music to overcome sorrow, to comfort the soul, and to transport the heart, and about the joy of making music together. It features poetry by a range of writers from different countries and backgrounds, and was commissioned by the Waltham Singers, director Andrew Fardell in 2022-23.

Here are two recordings of Music always round me with scrolling score: live recording (string accompaniment) digital recording (piano accompaniment)

Here is a live recording of the complete Endless Song

And here’s a link to the purchase details of Music always round me (with a link to the complete score, too)