New Seamus Heaney setting to premiere at Harvard

By Spencer Lenfield

 

CAMBRIDGE, MA — THE SOUND of a Harvard Commencement, for many, is the sound of choirs singing—exposed, organic, human. “To write for voices alone is a great challenge—it’s one of the purest tests of a composer’s craft and ingenuity,” says Richard Beaudoin, preceptor of music. The subtleties of the unaccompanied voice have occupied much of his time and concentration lately: President Drew Faust commissioned Beaudoin to write a setting of Seamus Heaney’s poem “Villanelle for an Anniversary” for this year’s Commencement. The poem was commissioned for the University’s 350th anniversary extravaganza in 1986; its reappearance this year marks the end of commemorating Harvard’s 375th anniversary.

 

“It seemed especially fitting to mark the end of our anniversary celebration by commissioning a work that would draw on the University’s shared history while at the same time creating something new,” Faust wrote in an e-mail.

 

The new choral work will premiere immediately after Heaney himself recites the poem, taking a place among the Latin and English of hymns and anthems used for centuries at Harvard. (Raising the status of the arts at Harvard has been a central theme of Faust’s presidency, and musical interludes have become a Commencement fixture: Wynton Marsalis played “America the Beautiful” on Commencement Day 2009, when he received an honorary degree, and Placido Domingo serenaded fellow honorary degree recipient Ruth Bader Ginsburg in 2011.)