Backyard Rhymes, for chorus
Duration: 12 minutes
Instrumentation: SATB choir
Premiere: April 21, 2024 by the Texas State University Chorale, Dr. Joey Martin, director in San Marcos, TX
Notes:
I met the poet Cecily Parks in August of 2014. At that time, we had both just moved from Manhattan to Central Texas to teach at Texas State University and were parents to young children, so we had a lot to talk about. Of course, I was also very interested in her poetry, and she kindly gave me a book of her beautiful poems, which I loved, as well as several new poems in manuscript. The new poems caught my attention immediately because I recognized some of our shared experience in them, especially in how they depict the vividness of the unfamiliar Texas landscape, its plants and animals, and the daily miniature dramas that unfold in the yard around the house. And how small things seem remarkable when experienced alongside children, whose fresh eyes catch what can otherwise be taken for granted. Immediately, I began to think about what these poems might sound like as music, though it took almost ten years for me to finally commit them to paper.
In its final form, Backyard Rhymes is a set of five choral songs. Three of the poems are in a kind of nursery-rhyme style, and these form the beginning, middle, and end of the set. Though they are superficially like children’s rhymes with benign nature imagery, there are darker undertones at play. Death is never far away from the birds and other creatures that share our neighborhoods. In my musical setting, I linked these three songs with shared musical material, also reminiscent of children’s songs and nursery rhyme rhythms. But I also tried to capture the darkness, subtly at first in the Backyard Rhyme, then more prominently in the sparse Front Yard Rhyme, and finally in the foreground in the elegiac Mother Cardinal Rhyme that concludes the set. In between these “rhymes” are two plant poems. Wild Flower captures chance beauty emerging from an otherwise controlled environment. I tried to capture not only the meaning and feeling of the poem, but also the experience of reading it, as the short lines of text can be regrouped and reinterpreted, with surprising new meanings emerging each time. Epiphyte Parable similarly celebrates serendipity, a lesson to be learned from these strange balls of moss that hang on the trees. Alternating between a playful wordless song sung by the high voices and a more introspective style for the commentary of the low voices, I tried to capture the quality of this backyard poetic meditation.