Before The Beginning of Years
Matthew Baier
About this work:
Before The Beginning Of Years (2007)
This work composed on a chorus from Algernon Ch. Swinburne’s “Atalanta In Calydon” is part of what may become a chamber opera in the future produced in collaboration with Peter Arcese and Athanata Arts, Ltd. of N.Y.C.
“In Atalanta In Calydon, Swinburne presents one of the bleakest interpretations of human experience in all of Victorian literature. Life in this work is perceived as a hopeless tangle of psychological contradictions,of which the largest and most painful is that in this state of inevitable frustration man feels an irrisistable urge to bring together the various sundered aspects of his existence, and to unite his isolated being with his universe. In Atatalanta In Calydon, this urge, in all its many forms of craving and desire, is called love. It is seen as being both impossible to resist and impossible to satisfy, since the condition of fragmented isolation is as inescapable as the urge to love is powerful. Consequently, because this state of polarized self-contradiction is the essential nature of life, man has no choice but to endure its tensions: he must remain variously divided in his being, and he must also yeild to the compulsion to try to heal those divisions”.
(Mark Siegchrist’s Studies in English Literature 1980 Pub. Rice University JSTOR archive pgrh1 pg 695)
Note on A.C. Swinburne
Algernon Charles Swinburne (1837 - 1909) was a controversial Victorian era poet highly regarded in his time particuarly in his early years with the successes of Atalanta in Calydon (1865), “Poems and Ballads”(1866) and “Songs Before Sunrise” (1871). He was sucessor to the literary traditions of Alfred Lord Tennyson and Robert Browning and continued by furthering their work in the employment of ancient and contemporary philosophical and religious concepts in writing and the form of the dramatic monologue He and his contemoraries of the Pre Raphael and Decadent movements helped give impetus to the transition between the Romantic and modern age in literature, poetry and philosophy in the arts.
The musical elements for this composition are drawn from a graphing and analysis of the phonemes of the first two lines of each verse. The alignment of these patterns with the Lydian mode provides all of the melodic material for the voice parts. The instrumental introduction to each verse uses and treats these materials serially before going on to shadow and accompany the existing vocal lines more independently.
Version: 2007
Year composed: 2007
Duration: 00:05:54
Ensemble type: Chorus, with or without Solo Voices:Chorus with Chamber Ensemble
Instrumentation:
Instrumentation notes: SATB with Flute, Guitar, Violin and Cello