World Premiere, 21 Years Later

My early music continues going through an odd renaissance lately. A week ago Sunday, the Bard flute ensemble – with no prodding from me – played my 1979 work Siren for five flutes, which hadn’t been heard publicly since the year it was written. And tonight, at Bard, student vocalist Liz Przybylski and accompanist Sharon Bjorndal are giving the world premiere of a song I wrote in 1985, “Mr. Eliot’s Sunday Morning Service,” on a poem by T.S. Eliot. I once wanted to write a whole T.S. Eliot song cycle, but I read that his estate disallows musical settings of his poems, so I assume that the song can’t be performed in any for-profit occasion, and I discontinued the cycle. Still, it’s the best, most ambitious song I ever wrote, and it’s been a blast to hear it coming from outside my head for the first time in 21 years. I guess the damn poem will go into public domain someday.

UPDATE: At the risk of representing the song badly, here’s the recording. Liz was having vocal problems that day and had been warned by her teacher not to sing, but she did anyway to avoid disappointing me. Given that, I thought it was a charming world premiere performance. And, since the poem’s in public domain after all (see comments), here it is, made-up words and all:

Polyphiloprogenitive

The sapient sutlers of the Lord

Drift across the window-panes.

In the beginning was the Word.

In the beginning was the Word.

Superfetation of to en,

And at the mensual turn of time

Produced enervate Origen.

A painter of the Umbrian school

Designed upon a gesso ground

The nimbus of the Baptized God.

The wilderness is cracked and browned

But through the water pale and thin

Still shine the unoffending feet

And there above the painter set

The Father and the Paraclete.

The sable presbyters approach

The avenue of penitence;

The young are red and pustular

Clutching piaculative pence.

Under the penitential gates

Sustained by staring Seraphim

Where the souls of the devout

Burn invisible and dim.

Along the garden-wall the bees

With hairy bellies pass between

The staminate and pistilate,

Blest office of the epicene.

Sweeney shifts from ham to ham

Stirring the water in his bath.

The masters of the subtle schools

Are controversial, polymath.