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Joan Szymko
Joan Szymko Music
It Is Happiness (Choral Rehearsal Score)
A twenty minute choral suite for treble voices and chamber orchestra featuring fresh and lively settings of iconic poetry by Mary Oliver.
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It Is Happiness
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It Is Happiness
SSA(A) with instrumental chamber ensemble
This is the SSA choral rehearsal score with piano reduction.
1. The Summer Day
2. Sunrise
3. Wild Geese
Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life? Such is the emphatic query in “The Summer Day” the first movement of It Is Happiness, a twenty minute choral suite for treble voices and chamber orchestra featuring fresh and lively settings of iconic poetry by Mary Oliver, one of America’s most significant and best-selling poets. Joan Szymko is honored to be one of just a handful of composers ever granted permission to set Oliver’s poetry to music.
Originally scored for piano octet (fl,ob,cl,hrn,bsn,vn(2),vc); this choral suite is available here for reduced forces: fl,vn,vc,pno. The SSA score with piano reduction is to be used in rehearsal for performance with either orchestration. Contact the composer for full orchestration availability.
Movement No.1, The Summer Day is available as a stand alone octavo with piano and flute obbligato for SSA or SAB voicing.
It Is Happiness
No.1 The Summer Day (available as a stand-alone octavo)
No.2 Sunrise
No.3 Wild Geese
Composer’s Notes
In 1995, I was invited to create a major work for Aurora Chorus, a then 140-voice women’s ensemble I had recently begun to lead as Artistic Director. As with all my choral works, words come first. And so I went about the careful process of choosing the “perfect” text for my very first choral composition to be accompanied by small orchestra. I kept returning to Mary Oliver’s poems for their powerful beauty and grace; for Oliver’s ability to move me to tears. Her words and images made me feel at home in the world. Even then, I felt disconnected from so much cultural hype and with an accelerating technological incursion that disembodied human communication. So it was with great solace that I turned to the volume: New and Selected Poems— to a woman who considers her one life to be “wild and precious” who “knows how to pay attention, how to fall down into the grass… how to feel idle and blessed” —and who asks in her poem “Sunrise,”
What is the name
of the deep breath I would take
over and over for all of us?
“It is happiness” she tells us— words I selected as the title of the three-poem choral suite. Oliver later wrote to me: “I like the title it is happiness a lot.” — which meant a lot to me.
I was thrilled when I heard from Mary Oliver again after she received the recording of the premiere performance. In a typewritten note she responded:
Dear Joan Szymko,
Just a note to tell you…that I have been listening to the tape of “It is Happiness” every morning for the past many mornings, in my car, early, on my way to the woods, and it has made me very happy. I like…its tenderness, its lushness, its entrenchment into the text. I like the instruments, what they do, and the surprise that they are there is a pleasant one, I thought it was chorus only. I like the certainty of the melodic line, and the play of it, its circling around.
I like it … altogether.
Thank you, therefore.
Cordially,
Mary Oliver
Text
Full text is available on the perusal pdf.
$10.00 per licensed PDF
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