August Week

voice, db, pno

Duration: 40’00
Date of Composition: 1989

PROGRAM NOTES:

Regarding August Week (1852), one could argue that the music has become a text and text, music, so interdependent are the two. The text, in this case, is drawn from the mammoth journal of the “Cosmic Yankee,” Henry David Thoreau. In one of his 39 “blank-books” Thoreau recorded his thoughts virtually every day, from 1837 right up until the time of his final illness. By the time of his death in 1862, he had amassed an astounding total of more than two million words. The Journal of Henry D. Thoreau was finally published in 1906, complete in 14 volumes. (The edition was an almost immediate sell-out!). Many, if not most, of its nearly 7,000 pages are devoted to describing hours of the author’s serene and solitary, but sublime relationship with nature: notes on species of birds and their songs, descriptions (and the Latin names) of plants, and comments on the condition of rivers, ponds and reports on the weather.

“ ‘Says I to myself,’ “ said Thoreau, “should be the motto of my journal.” Which was once described as “one of the most complete records extant of the inner life of an individual.” Consequently, as a musical work, August Week (1852) is intimate and personal. The journal entries from Volume IV for seven consecutive days – Sunday, August 15 to Saturday, August 21, 1852 – are set without pause. However, each day is set off by its’ own tonal color through a series of modulations into one of seven modes and is yet further distinguished by slight changes in instrumental timbre. Reflecting the seamless continuity of the text, the middle line of the three-part musical texture runs something like an Eastern Massachusetts vine from beginning to end in even eight notes. All three parts, including the vocal line, are restricted in range, an echo of Thoreau’s quietism and contemplative nature. In both music and text, change is subtle and gradual, a process; there is simplicity at the same time as profusion, qualities that bring 20th-century minimalism to mind. With its Zen-like, meditative equability and duration of nearly 35 minutes, August Week (1852) is comparative to plain-song. Incidentally, if one were to set Thoreau’s entire journal at a similar tempo, the performance time would run to 13 days and 15 hours.

-James Sellars