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Timothy Hoekman
Timothy Hoekman Music
North Carolina Songs
The beauties of nature in chamber music form.
Medium-high voice, violin, viola, cello, harp
Four short poems by the North Carolina poet A.R. Ammons provide the texts for this chamber work. The piece was commissioned by and premiered at the Coastal Carolina Chamber Music Festival in 2004. The first performers were mezzo-soprano Janna Baty, violinist Melvin Chen, violist Kirsten Johnson, cellist Jennifer Lucht, and harpist Anna Reinersman. The vocal range makes this work appropriate for sopranos, mezzo-sopranos, or tenors. The work comes with a complete score, individual instrumental parts, and a piano/vocal reduction (for rehearsal purposes only).
Composer’s Notes
The text for the song cycle North Carolina Songs comes from four poems by the North Carolina poet A.R. Ammons. Born in Whiteville, NC in 1926, Ammons attended Wake Forest University after his navy service in WWII. Following various jobs in his home state he began to teach at Cornell University in 1964. Ammons wrote nearly 30 books of poetry and won many awards during his career, including the National Book Award, the Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Bollingen Prize, the Wallace Stevens Award, the Robert Frost Medal, the Ruth Lilly Prize, along with numerous prestigious fellowships. He was the Goldwin Smith Professor of Poetry at Cornell University until his retirement in 1998. He died only a few years later, on February 25, 2001.
The four poems used in North Carolina Songs find their common theme in nature, although the fourth poem focuses more on a personal search than on nature itself. The composer has tried to paint in musical sound what Ammons painted with words: a bee landing on a morning glory flower; a sparrow’s song; a leafless cherry tree in winter being transformed as a blue jay lands in it; and the exhilaration and freedom of youth, followed by the desire for stability and grounding. The four songs of the set are performed without pause, being joined together by instrumental transitions. Each of the short pieces has melodies of its own; however, the melody heard in the final section of the fourth song (“I want to touch down now and taste the ground”) first heard in the voice, then cello, then viola, is based on the cello solo at the beginning of the first song, thus providing a somewhat cyclical form to the work.
-Timothy Hoekman
Text
1. Transfer
When the bee lands the
morning glory bloom
dips some and weaves:
the coming true of
weight
from weightless wing-held
air
seems at the touch
implausible.
2. Glass
The song
sparrow puts all his
saying
into one
repeated song;
what
variations, subtleties
he manages,
to encompass denser
meanings, I’m
too coarse
to catch: it’s
one song, an over-reach
from which
all possibilities,
like filaments,
depend:
killing
nesting, dying,
sun or cloud,
figure up
and become
song—simple, hard;
removed.
3. Winter Scene
There is now not a single
leaf on the cherry tree:
except when the jay
plummets in, lights, and,
in pure clarity, squalls:
then every branch
quivers and
breaks out in blue leaves.
4. When I Was Young the Silk
When I was young the silk
of my mind
hard as a peony head
unfurled
and wind bloomed the parachute:
The air-head tugged me
up,
tore my roots loose and drove
high, so high
I want to touch down now
and taste the ground
I want to take in
my silk
and ask where I am
before it is too late to know
-A.R. Ammons
$18.00 per licensed PDF
