A LITTLE GARDEN – Text by Frantisek (“Franta”) Bass

My composition A Little Garden for unison treble chorus or soprano solo and piano is now available for sale from oySongs.com. (You’ll need to copy and paste the entire link into a browser to access my Web page there.)

http://www.oysongs.com/products/sheetmusic.cfm?sheetmusic_id=11780&artist_id=206#scorch 

If you have the free Scorch plug-in from http://www.sibelius.com installed on your computer, you will be able to both see and hear the music. 

 

The text for this brief but moving piece, written by Frantisek (“Franta”) Bass (b. Brno, 1930; Deported to Terezin, 1941; d. Auschwitz, 1944), appears in the book I Never Saw Another Butterfly, a collection of works of art and poetry by Jewish children who lived in the Theresienstadt concentration camp. Permission to set the text was granted by the poet’s brother. He wrote to me, “Dear Mr. Hoffman, I am deeply moved by your work and I send you a picture of Franta from about the time the poem was written. Maybe you can [use] it. Grateful and thankful, Pavel Uri Bass.” The picture appears on my Website, http://www.stanleymhoffman.com/uwp.htm. 

 

The music is simple in style, containing only “white-notes.” It begins with an unaccompanied hummed passage marked “Freely, like a Hebrew Haftorah chant.” I used the word “like” because I employed several pitches which are foreign to that system of chant, as if to say that something is not right here. The poet died one year after what would have been his bar mitzvah year, and chanting the Haftorah is customarily part of the ritual for the bar mitzvah boy. Next the piano enters and the voice(s) sing the text in a melody that, while using new contours, harkens back to the chant (as does the piano writing). The piece closes with the same unaccompanied hummed passage with which it begins, except that it is marked “As at the beginning, but with longer pauses in between phrases,” for added expression. 

 

Thank you for your consideration.

 

Stanley M. Hoffman, Ph.D.

www.choralnet.org/view/user/12190

www.stanleymhoffman.com