Prayers of Steel (Salem, MA 2000)

This is the first to be completed of a set of four Carl Sandburg settings.  I composed it as an example piece for a talk delivered at The Objectivist Center Summer Seminar at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, July of 2000.  The talk was an attempt to lead a lay audience through the process of composition---down dead ends and rejected ideas---to a completed project.  I used my laptop and a MIDI keyboard to play through ideas in the "in process" stage.  The actual talk went well, excepting that it was a technical problem nightmare.  Everything that could have gone wrong did, from the microphone, to the overhead projector to the synthesizer and back again.  It was almost amusing even at the time.  Almost.  : )  

Anyway, this is a better example than Romanze of my harmonic idiom at the moment.  The piece is pretty challenging but still singable.   

Here is the text:

Prayers Of Steel  [By Carl Sandburg, from Leather Leggings in the collection Cornhuskers]

Lay me on an anvil, O God.
Beat me and hammer me into a crow bar.
Let me pry loose old walls.
Let me lift and loosen old foundations.

Lay me on an anvil, O God.
Beat me and hammer me into a steel spike.
Drive me into the girders the hold a skyscraper together.
Take red-hot rivets and fasten me into the central girders.
Let me be the great nail holding a skyscraper together through blue nights into white stars.

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

• Prayers of Steel -- MP3
• Prayers of Steel -- Sibelius Score
• Prayers of Steel -- General MIDI file