COME AWAY DEATH (2012)
For Countertenor (or soprano), Harp, and Chorus
Duration ca. 9:00
PROGRAM NOTES
“Come Away Death” is a song performed by Feste the fool in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night. The song’s text is dark and poignant; a narrator laments the inevitability of death, and worries that his passing will go unremarked and his life unremembered. I am intrigued by the relationship between this text and the many generations of actors who have performed it. The majority of these performers have, just as Feste feared, passed behind the shroud of history and been forgotten.
This composition attempts to represent that “shroud of history” in sound, creating aleatoric clouds of harmony that threaten to overwhelm a simple setting of Shakespeare’s text for countertenor and harp.
Premiered by Timothy Parsons with the Manhattan School of Music Chamber Chorus in borden Auditorium, New York, NY (October 2012).
SCORE PREVIEW
