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Carol Barnett
Carol Barnett (Beady Eyes)
From the Good Earth
Long vocal lines and piano flourishes imitating the ch’in and gong evoke the vastness of Pearl S. Buck's beloved China.
SSA, piano
Moving between unison, canon, and parallel motion, the piece has a refreshingly different sonic character that nevertheless remains accessible for choirs of differing abilities. The voices work in non-traditional harmonies comprised mainly of fifths and seconds while the piano imitates the sounds of the ch’in (Chinese zither) and large gongs.
Composer’s Notes
Keeping in mind that Pearl Buck spent much of her life in China, I have tried to enhance her wonderfully evocative text by employing the traditional Chinese pentatonic scale, avoiding Western-type harmonies in favor of long melodic lines to convey the vastness of that country, and using the piano to imitate the sounds of the ch’in (Chinese zither) and large gongs. The two levels of tonality – d/F and eb/Gb – represent descriptive reality versus timeless imagined landscapes.
– Carol Barnett
Text
“The earth lay rich and dark, and fell apart lightly under the points of their hoes. Sometimes they turned up a bit of brick, a splinter of wood. It was nothing. Some time, in some age, bodies of men and women had been buried there, houses had stood there, had fallen, and gone back into the earth. So would also their house, sometime, return into the earth, their bodies also. Each had his turn at this earth. They worked on, moving together–together–producing the fruit of this earth– speechless in their movement together.”
– from The Good Earth by Pearl S. Buck, copyright 1931, renewed 1958
– used with the permission of the Pearl Buck Family Trust
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