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Eric William Barnum
A conductor and composer, Eric William Barnum continues to passionately seek new ground in the choral field. Working with choirs of all kinds, his collaborative leitmotif endeavors to provide intensely meaningful experiences for singers and audiences. Barnum is currently the Director of Choral Activities at Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa and previously, the Director...
Eric William Barnum
Remembered Light
A dramatic and difficult choral work exploring time, memory, and oblivion.
SATB a cappella
One of the many collaborations between Eric Barnum, Richard Larson, and Kantorei (Denver), “Remembered Light” uses the stunning text and imagery of young Clark Ashton Smith to create a cinematic scape of sound and light. Highly imaginative imagery and constantly shifting textures highlight this difficult work. Use of repetition, block architecture, whistling and soaring atmospheric soprano lines musically represent the setting sun, the falling of snow, and the coming twilight of years.
Text
The years are a falling of snow,
Slow, but without cessation,
On hills and mountains and flowers and worlds that were;
But snow and the crawling night in which it fell
May be washed away in one swifter hour of flame.
Thus it was that some slant of sunset
In the chasms of piled cloud —
Transient mountains that made a new horizon,
Uplifting the west to fantastic pinnacles —
Smote warm in a buried realm of the spirit,
Till the snows of forgetfulness were gone.
Bright was the twilight, sharp like ethereal wine
Above, but low in the clefts it thickened,
Dull as with duskier tincture.
Stars that were nearer, more radiant than ours,
Quivered and pulsed in the clear thin gold of the sky.
These things I beheld,
Till the gold was shaken with flight
Of fantastical wings like broken shadows,
Forerunning the darkness;
Till the twilight shivered with outcry of eldritch voices,
Like pain’s last cry ere oblivion.
– Clark Ashton Smith (1893-1961)
Text source: Harriet Monroe, ed. (1860–1936). Poetry: A Magazine of Verse. 1912–22.
Slow, but without cessation,
On hills and mountains and flowers and worlds that were;
But snow and the crawling night in which it fell
May be washed away in one swifter hour of flame.
Thus it was that some slant of sunset
In the chasms of piled cloud —
Transient mountains that made a new horizon,
Uplifting the west to fantastic pinnacles —
Smote warm in a buried realm of the spirit,
Till the snows of forgetfulness were gone.
Bright was the twilight, sharp like ethereal wine
Above, but low in the clefts it thickened,
Dull as with duskier tincture.
Stars that were nearer, more radiant than ours,
Quivered and pulsed in the clear thin gold of the sky.
These things I beheld,
Till the gold was shaken with flight
Of fantastical wings like broken shadows,
Forerunning the darkness;
Till the twilight shivered with outcry of eldritch voices,
Like pain’s last cry ere oblivion.
– Clark Ashton Smith (1893-1961)
Text source: Harriet Monroe, ed. (1860–1936). Poetry: A Magazine of Verse. 1912–22.
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