The Grasses

This piece contrasts an excerpt from Walt Whitman's preface to Leaves of Grass with 1 Peter 1:24 "All flesh is as grass...", otherwise known as the best part of the the thoroughly excellent Brahms Requiem.  Whitman's text urges us to think for ourselves and do the right thing, letting our lives speak for our morals. The biblical passage reminds us that our lives are beautiful, but short, lending urgency to Whitman's words.  There is only so much time.  

“…read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body...” -Walt Whitman

For all flesh is as grass, and all the glory of man as the flower of grass. The grass withereth, and the flower thereof falleth away: 1 Peter 1:24

Hi @pateceramics!

The beginning is really dark with a dark key and dissonancnes. I like that in the first few pages the dissonances are still remained until the really bright C major section, and after that it's all God's glories. I also like how the four voices interact with imitations and call and response. Thx for sharing!

Henry

Thanks, Henry!  Yes, the beginning is a jazz minor scale (melodic minor ascending used for both the scale up and the scale down) with fourths raised for a bit of extra leading tone (leading tone to the fifth).  And then we flip around a bit between Mixolydian and eventually a nice bright C Major.  

One of my bigger challenges with this piece was being sure that Whitman's lovely text would be heard through everything that is going on.  It's a long and wordy text and I knew I wanted to work the "all flesh is as grass" in as well as a second idea.  The text ends up similar in length to the "credo" section of the big masses, so it presents the same problem of how to fit it all in.  I ended up doing a fair amount of homophonic writing in the early parts of the piece to keep the text clear and understandable and using the piano part to keep things lively, as well as having different voices come in and out to add emphasis to certain lines and keep things interesting.  But by the second half, the singer may have a disorientingly fragmented experience, since I was often needing a voice part to switch back and forth from the poem to the biblical text in mid-thought to try and keep the lines from becoming too tangled with each other.  To avoid some overlapping of people singing different texts simultaneously, I chopped the lines into little pieces and stitched them back together as a quilt to get the important words to punch through.  Hopefully it's not too jarring an experience.  

The Catholic Church's Council on Trent (1545-1563) apparently specifically condemned this kind of polyphonic tomfoolery, feeling that interfering with the understandability of a text was missing the point of singing as a mode of communication.  But of course, then what the heck do you do about the credo section of your choral mass to keep it from being boring and ten minutes long if you are composing for the church?