My cantata about the joy of singing, ‘Endless Song’, contains settings of poems from a variety of different backgrounds and cultures. But for one movement, I wanted to home in on the power of music to calm, to heal, to support, and to tell our story. I couldn’t find anything suitable, and so I wrote the words myself.
The disadvantage of doing this, of course, is that I’m not a poet. But the advantage is that one can write the words and the music together – sometimes letting the words lead the music, and at other times letting the music shape the words.
The opening bars came to me as a complete musical idea – a two-note figure in one voice with a four or five-note response in the other voices – for which I then wrote the words:
Music: telling our story,
Music: feeding the soul.
Music: comfort in trouble,
Music: solace for all.
Then after that the music took over, and the words came afterwards. Melodically I extended these opening phrases, with all four voices singing together for the first time, with a slightly faster rhythm and a wider pitch range – however as I reached the end of this short section the music wanted to slow down, moving, for the first time, away from the key-signature to a rather darker chord. So the words grew towards this change of mood too:
Music of the starry sky,
Music of the rolling sea;
Music of the sparkling day,
Music of the lonely night.
This song was originally written for string quartet/quintet and voices, though it works equally well with piano. From the beginning the accompaniment has the role of commentary between the vocal entries – but from this point it takes over and voices and accompaniment are blended together, for a section which grows more animated and then calms down again:
Music for friendship, music for loving;
Music for parting, music for grieving;
Music of the circling planets, music of the spinning moon;
Music of the changing, changing world.
And the piece continues, with alternation between these different textures, moving to a rich climax (Music of life, music of joy, music of freedom…) and finally calming down for the final phrase, Music for the world, a poignant reminder of the universal language, and universal hope, that music represents. And I hope, too, that the approach that I took for this piece results in a seamless fusion of words and music.
You can hear Music for the Soul here with a scrolling score: live performance with strings, or digital performance with piano, and the printed music is available here.
And details of the complete Endless Song are here.