Love is a place

by Matthew Whittall

for mixed choir

Description

In this set of love songs after one of the great poets of the genre, I
wanted to create a sense of progression from various phases of that
universal feeling – falling in love, building a life with a partner, the
birth of children, death and loss – but one in which the individual
songs could describe any of these stages, and sometimes several. The
pleasing ambiguity of Cummings’ love poetry, the way in which much of it
could be addressed to a lover, a parent, a child, is one of its
greatest strengths. The three songs all hover around the approximate key
of D major and employ the same soft harmonic palette. The variations in
texture are meant to evoke Cummings’ idiosyncratic graphic layout,
punctuation, and constant parenthetical commentary within his lines, as
well as to distill the essence of each mood. somewhere i have never
travelled is a rhapsodic part song. love is a place is suspended in a
blissful, near-timeless haze, and I carry your heart is an easy
polyphonic ballad.

Instrumentation

chx

Category

Vocal and Choral Works

Language

En

Lyricist

E.E. Cummings

Commisioned by / dedications

Commissioned by and dedicated to the Dominante choir and their conductor, Seppo Murto, for their 40th anniversary

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