The Long Year (2021)
Duration: 24:00 minutes
Instrumentation: low voice and piano
Premiere: February 1, 2022 by Will Liverman, baritone, and Myra Huang, piano, presented by Vocal Arts DC at the Terrace Theater, The Kennedy Center, Washington DC
Notes:
The Long Year is a set of seven songs to poetry by Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892-1950). On the surface, this set is simply a collection of seasonal nature poems, arranged according to a calendar year (starting with winter, moving through spring, summer and fall, and ending with winter). But beneath the surface, something seems to be wrong with the state of nature in these poems, or humanity’s relationship to the natural world. While Millay wrote these words in the first part of the twentieth century, I couldn’t help reading our current climate collapse into these texts. Through that lens, these songs express my own longing for a return to a right relationship with the landscape, and other living beings, and with the weather and the progression of the seasons, but also my awareness that this relationship is irretrievably lost. The Long Year resides in this state of longing for something you know is gone forever.
The title comes from another poem, one of Millay’s masterful sonnets:
Mindful of you the sodden earth in spring,
And all the flowers that in the springtime grow,
And dusty roads, and thistles, and the slow
Rising of the round moon, all throats that sing
The summer through, and each departing wing,
And all the nests that the bared branches show,
And all winds that in any weather blow,
And all the storms that the four seasons bring.
You go no more on your exultant feet
Up paths that only mist and morning knew,
Or watch the wind, or listen to the beat
Of a bird’s wings too high in air to view, —
But you were something more than young and sweet
And fair, — and the long year remembers you.
