“Sea Fever” is the title of one of John Masefield’s (1878–1967) most well-known works, which describes the poet’s longing to go to sea. Masefield spent time as a sailor aboard different ships and his poem effortlessly demonstrates his love for and affinity with this lifestyle. The poem appears in Masefield’s collection of poems called Salt Water Ballads, first published in 1902. Clear Water blends selections from Masefield’s “Sea Fever” and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s “The Tide Rises, The Tide Falls” to reflect the steady flow of water into the ocean. The composer, Robert I. Hugh, recalls memories of his father reading Sea Fever aloud when he was young. The layering of voices paired with the active piano accompaniment perfectly describes the ebb and flow of the sea and tides.
Kenneth Riggs’ song Snow is taken from the poem “Snow-flakes” written by the American poet Henry Wordsworth Longfellow (1807–1882). Longfellow wrote many poems which are still famous today, including “The Song of Hiawatha” and “Paul Revere’s Ride.” Longfellow is considered the first professional American poet and was certainly the most popular poet of the nineteenth century. A number of his phrases, such as “ships that pass in the night,” “the patter of little feet,” and “I shot an arrow into the air,” have become commonplace. Kenneth Riggs (b. 1969) is the choir director at Tahoma High School in Maple Valley, Washington, and is active as a composer, arranger, and performer in the greater Seattle area.
Flooding Rains is one of many original works created by Australian composer Harley Mead (1971–2014). Mead was a well-known composer, conductor and educator who was regarded not only for his expertise as a teacher and musician but also for his ability to inspire and encourage others. His compositions, of approximately 100 titles, have been performed widely across Australia and overseas. He often used a mixture of instruments and vocal timbers to explore and enhance the colors and palette of his musical vocabulary. Mead also loved the story-telling aspect of music-making, and the dramatic nature of Flooding Rains is a prime example of that love. He writes of the song:
On February 15th, 2008, I sat at the Mackay airport with a colleague waiting to fly to Brisbane. As the time passed, the horizon grew darker and the air heavy. The plane departed on time and it was not until the next morning that the force of the heavy air and ominous horizon was realised. The Mackay floods of 2008 devastated schools, families and businesses. Time has passed, buildings have been repaired, yet the memory of the “Flooding Rains” will remain forever.
Mackay is a magnificent city with a strong sense of community. The inspiration for this song came from the personal stories of the children who experienced an amazing event. Some felt sadness, others surprise, some felt excitement of the adventure, others felt “really really wet”. Mackay is filled with resilient people who rebuilt their lives and have developed a stronger sense of unity.
Read the poem here.
Special thanks to Mrs. Melanie Spohnheimer for playing the flute in this piece.
The poem “Rhapsody” was written by the writer, poet, literary critic, editor, and anthologist William Stanley Braithwaite (1878–1962). Braithwaite was born in Boston, Massachusetts to a father who was from British Guiana and a mother who was an ex-slave. At the age of twelve his father died, forcing him to quit school and find work to support his family. When he was fifteen, he apprenticed as a typesetter, and it was during that time that he developed an affinity for writing poetry. By 1904 Braithwaite had published his first volume of poetry entitled Lyrics and Life and Love. Set by American composer Rollo Dilworth (b. 1970), this piece has an uplifting feeling mirroring the hopeful tenor of the text.
Thomas Dunn English (1819–1902) was an American Democratic Party politician from New Jersey who represented the state's 6th congressional district in the House of Representatives from 1891 to 1895. He was also a published author and songwriter, who had a bitter feud with Edgar Allan Poe. English was considered a major West Virginia poet of the mid-nineteenth century. His poem “The Old Mill” is cleverly set here by Kenneth Riggs and features an incessantly moving piano accompaniment meant to represent the continued steady march of time, independent of the activities of mankind.
Wade in the Water is a Negro spiritual tightly associated with the Underground Railroad. The verses of the song referring to the Israelites’ escape out of Egypt as found in Exodus 14 are a clear metaphor for the hopes of the slaves trying to find freedom. In particular, Harriet Tubman used the song “Wade in the Water” to tell escaping slaves to get off the trail and into the water to make sure that the dogs employed by slavers lost their trail. The song was first performed in a concert setting by the Fisk Jubilee Singers at the turn of the 20th century. In modern times, many choral aficionados would recognize this arrangement as the handiwork of American composer Moses Hogan (1957–2003), best known for his settings of black spirituals.
William Butler Yeats (1865–1939), Nobel Prize winning Irish dramatist, author and poet, wrote the poem “Aedh Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven.” Although only eight lines long, the poem is rich with the vivid imagery of a man’s love for a lady who might not share his feelings. The composer, Victor C. Johnson, is a native of Dallas, Texas, whose first piece was published in 1994, while he was a sophomore in high school. To date, he has over 200 octavos and choral products in print.
The Vagabond is the first movement of the Songs of Travel, a song cycle of nine songs originally written for baritone voice composed by Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872–1958), with poems drawn from the Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–1894) collection Songs of Travel and Other Verses. Written between 1901 and 1904, the Songs of Travel represent the English composer's first major foray into songwriting. Drawn from a volume of Robert Louis Stevenson poems of the same name, the cycle offers a quintessentially British take on the "wayfarer cycle". The audience is introduced to the traveler — that world-weary yet resolute individual — with heavy "marching" chords in the piano that depict a rough journey through the English countryside. Stevenson was a Scottish novelist, poet and travel writer, most noted for writing Treasure Island, Kidnapped, Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and A Child's Garden of Verses.
John Gillespie Magee, Jr. (1922–1941) entered flight training in 1941 when he was eighteen years old, and soon was sent to England to join the No. 412 Fighter Squadron, RCAF. He was assigned to fly the Supermarine Spitfire and flew air defense over England against the German Luftwaffe. As he orbited and climbed upward to 30,000 feet in a test flight, a poem came to his mind; back on the ground in a letter to his parents he included the poem, explaining: “It started at 30,000 feet, and was finished soon after I landed.” Just three months later Magee was killed in an air collision with another plane. His poem “High Flight” has become a mantra for pilots and has been called the most famous aviation poem ever written. This was composer Karen Linford Robinson’s (b. 1967) first choral piece, and she has masterfully captured the acrobatic beauty of what Magee certainly must have felt.
Robert Lee Frost (1874–1963) was an American poet. Known for his realistic depictions of rural life and his command of American colloquial speech, Frost frequently wrote about settings from rural life in New England in the early 20th century, using them to examine complex social and philosophical themes. “The Road Not Taken” is one of Frost’s most popular works, and perhaps his most frequently misunderstood poem. Often read simply as a poem that champions the idea of “following your own path,” it belies some irony regarding such an idea. Frost himself wrote the poem as a joke for his friend Edward Thomas, who was often indecisive about which route to take when the two went walking. According to Lawrance Thompson, Frost's biographer, as Frost was once about to read the poem, he commented to his audience, “You have to be careful of that one; it's a tricky poem—very tricky,” perhaps intending to suggest the poem's ironic possibilities.