The City In the Sea: Choral Tone Poem (SATB divisi & Orchestra) Now Available

As of the present writing, this choral tone poem had been gestating for over thirty years, and the concept and harmonies for it for over forty years. In the 1980s I began to work with the latter two in my brief orchestral piece Little Sea Nocturne.

When reading the poetry of Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849), I am most struck by how musical they are. When recited aloud they exhibit their own rhythmic sense. I was eager to incorporate those rhythms into my music. I had long been familiar with his poem The City In the Sea and began to sketch choral passages for the present choral tone poem in the 1990s. It took me until 2022 to complete it because I required many more years of experience at my craft to do so to lead into out of the choruses. In 2012 I completed a seven-minute unaccompanied version of the choruses with music unique to and unifying it simply called The City In the Sea.

In composing The City In the Sea: Choral Tone Poem, my goal was to write a piece that, while steeped in tradition, sounds unlike anything in the literature that had come before it. The result is an original hybrid work that successfully and memorably combines salient aspects of the tonal, atonal, and modal musical languages into an organic whole. George Perle coined the term “twelve-tone tonality” to describe the music of Alban Berg and composers influenced by him such as Luigi Dallapiccola. The last title of which I am aware that accomplishes anything remotely related to what I am trying to accomplish musically in this choral tone poem is the piece Paradiso Choruses by Donald Martino (1974). However, I take twelve-tone tonality in entirely other directions in my work.

That the duration of The City In the Sea: Choral Tone Poem came out to be thirteen minutes seems appropriate for piece about a sunken city. Rather than write program notes that narrate how the music unfolds I will simply shout out the most memorable aspects of what careful listeners will discern: a recurring heartbeat motif; shifting polychordal harmonies; echo technique; rhythmic diminutions and augmentations; an a cappella chorus featuring those harmonies with a surprisingly memorable recurring theme on top; sensuous flute duets; string section underpinnings by way of either sustained passages or wave-like gestures; tritone-related melodies, harmonies, and tone centers; several strategically placed grand pauses; tritone-related modal-sounding passages; melodic and chord clusters, especially the two climactic ones.

INSTRUMENTATION

2 Flutes (2. doubles on Piccolo)

2 Oboes (2. doubles on English Horn)

2 Bb Clarinets

2 Bassoons

2 F Horns

2 C Trumpets

2 Trombones

Tuba

Timpani

Percussion (Gong, Bass Drum, Chimes, Glockenspiel)

Harp

Strings

DURATION

13:00

Difficult.

Scrolling score YouTube video: https://youtu.be/3fTvZO1N5uw