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An 18th-century English woman whose fiancé has been killed fighting with the Duke in Flanders narrates Amy Lowell’s classic Imagist poem. The loss causes her to spend the rest of her days unconsciously walking her gardens, forever reliving the moment she received the news, and imagining a now-deprived future with her husband.
Her passionate outcry is against her personal loss, but also likens such concepts as war, artificial restraint, and societal roles to patterns that we are stuck in and must break. Critics have described the poem as not only a general expression of repressed rebellion against conventions, but also as Lowell’s personal expression of a woman's right to sexual desire. My setting treats each stanza of the poem as a separate song, with two instrumental interludes. The accompaniment represents other “characters” in the drama: percussion, her fiancé; the string quartet, the staid and correct façade she must continue to wear; and the recorded sound – seemingly coming from nowhere – her deteriorating sanity.
Recorded live at Settlement Music School, South Philadelphia.
Tracy Sturgis, Soprano
Faustina Housner, Violin
Kristy Chen, Violin
Zeke Francis, Viola
Simon Housner, Violoncello
Andrea Bianchi, Percussion
Kris Rudzinski, Percussion
Text: Amy Lowell
An 18th-century English woman whose fiancé has been killed fighting with the Duke in Flanders narrates Amy Lowell’s classic Imagist poem. The loss causes her to spend the rest of her days unconsciously walking her gardens, forever reliving the moment she received the news, and imagining a now-deprived future with her husband.
Her passionate outcry is against her personal loss, but also likens such concepts as war, artificial restraint, and societal roles to patterns that we are stuck in and must break. Critics have described the poem as not only a general expression of repressed rebellion against conventions, but also as Lowell’s personal expression of a woman's right to sexual desire. My setting treats each stanza of the poem as a separate song, with two instrumental interludes. The accompaniment represents other “characters” in the drama: percussion, her fiancé; the string quartet, the staid and correct façade she must continue to wear; and the recorded sound – seemingly coming from nowhere – her deteriorating sanity.
