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this is the garden (from Quilt Songs)
Alice Parker
Inspired by the quilt Midnight Garden, Parker uses mixed meter and robust harmonies to bring e.e. cummings’ poetry to life.
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Quilt Songs: Women Weaving the Fabric of Life
SATB, a cappella
from the choral cycle Quilt Songs.
“this is the garden” is a part of Quilt Songs: Women Weaving the Fabric of Life, commissioned in 2015 to highlight the quilts of Kay McCarthy. Alice Parker chose the quilt Midnight Garden and uses mixed meter and robust harmonies to bring e.e. cummings’ poetry to life.
Composer’s Notes
When I was in college I acquired a complete collection of E. E. Cummings, and he has been one of my favorite poets ever since. And in all those years since I have been amassing folders full of poems that have caught my ear—this one, copied out, among them. Every time I receive a commission for a new work, I page through this collection, pausing at those which leap off the page.
So when I saw that dark quilt, with its shadowy colors and air of mystery, this poem came instantly to mind. When I sat down to work at it, the music simply owed—because I had known and loved the poem for so long. It was all waiting to come out—and the quilt enabled that transformation into sound. It wrote itself.
– Alice Parker
Text
this is the garden: colours come and go,
frail azures uttering from night’s outer wing
strong silent greens serenely lingering,
absolute lights like baths of golden snow.
This is the garden: pursed lips do blow
upon cool flutes within wide glooms, and sing
(of harps celestial to the quivering string)
invisible faces hauntingly and slow.
This is the garden. Time shall surely reap
and on Death’s blade lie many a flower curled,
in other lands where other songs be sung;
yet stand They here enraptured, as among
the slow deep trees perpetual of sleep
some silver-fingered fountain steals the world.
– e. e. cummings
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