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Haunts (Salem, MA 2001)

This it the third of the four songs. As I mentioned in the other comment Fire-Logs and Haunts are related, not just in harmonic material, but in their odd mood and texture. Additionally, the primary melodic responsibility in Fire-Logs is carried by the women supported and colored by the men, and in Haunts by the men supported and colored by the women. This was a deliberate meta-structure that I placed to help balance off the set of pieces.

I love the mood of the words, that sense of longing for something long since dead and gone. That mood overpowers the narrator, drawing him back to the places of painful memory. I think that I provide a prism through which to hear some of the undercurrents of the poem. One of the things that I do as a composer when writing to a text like this, is to take one interpretation of the poem and unpack some of the poetic compression. I allow supressed feeling to bubble to the surface. It is as if you opened a book, and realized that each of the pages folded out into a wonderous, brightly colored picture that you didn't know was originally there. With the setting, I can show you some of those pages as I hear them.

I was quite unsure of this when I first wrote it. The harmonic space is very dissonant linearly, but most of the individual vertical sounds are simple intervals. I was aiming at a sense of disorientation because, moment by moment, the sound is gentle and melifluous, but across time there is a sense of confusion and slipping, sliding misdirection.

Here is the text:

Haunts  [By Carl Sandburg, from Haunts in the collection Cornhuskers]

There are places I go when I am strong.
One is a marsh pool where I used to go with a long-eared hound-dog.
One is a wild crab apple tree; I was there a moonlight night with a girl.
The dog is gone; the girl is gone; I go to these places when there is no other place to go.

Again, I would suggest following the Sibelius score so that you have some hope of understanding what text goes with which moment.    

Questions or comments? Let me know....