Reality Is an Activity of the Most August Imagination
text by Wallace Stevens
Judith Malafronte, soprano, Larry Bell, pianist, April 17, 1980, Paul Hall, The Juilliard School
“Reality is an Activity of the Most August Imagination” for soprano and piano was written in 1977 and originally was intended to be half of a song cycle based on two poems of Wallace Stevens. The music to the other song, “The Poems of Our Climate” has been written and revised many times, but, to my mind, it is incomplete.
The form of the music is an athematic arch suggested by the form as well as the content of the poem. I think the poem is about natural light and its relationship to human feeling. In simple terms, I wanted the music to act as fireworks going up, reaching a brilliant apogee, and then dissolving into darkness. This, like many of Stevens’s poems, seems to begin in the real and end in the imagination and I tried to make the music correspond on every level to the demands of the poetry. The work concludes with an almost unrecognizable restatement of the first vocal phrase.
Last Friday, in the big light of last Friday night,
We drove home from Cornwall to Hartford, late.
It was not a night blown at a glassworks in Vienna
Or Venice, motionless, gathering time and dust.
There was a crush of strength in a grinding going round,
Under the front of the westward evening star,
The vigor of glory, a glittering in the veins,
As things emerged and moved and were dissolved,
Either in distance, change or nothingness,
The visible transformations of summer night,
An argentine abstraction approaching form
And suddenly denying itself away.
There was an insolid billowing of the solid.
Night’s moonlight lake was neither water nor air
More Vocal and Choral Works
The Prism of the Lyre, Opus 197 1
Seven Principles for SATB chorus acapella No. 7, Opus 193 2
In Common Things for soprano and piano, Opus 190 no. 2 4
Music when soft voices die, no. 1, Opus 190 no. 1 5
The Shadows Fall So Gently, Opus 181 6
Parables of Love and Death, Opus 173 8
A Hymnbook for Congregational Singing, Opus 169 9
The Harp at Nature's Advent, Opus 167 10
Thou God of Love, Thou Ever Blessed, Opus 164 11
Blest Are the Sons of Peace, Opus 16 12
O God our Help in Ages Past, Opus 162 13
Awake our Souls, Away our Fears, Opus 160 15
Domenica a Filicudi, Opus 158 17
The Lone Wild Bird, Opus 154 18
Once to Every Soul and Nation, Opus 144 21
Arrangements of Congregational Music for Thanksgiving, Opus 142 22
I'm Just A Poor Wayfaring Stranger, Opus 131 25
And Am I Born to Die?, Opus 129 26
Fancies, a cycle of five songs for Tenor and Piano, Opus 117 31
Revels, A cycle of ten songs for Baritone Voice and Piano, Opus 114 32
The Echolocations of Cellos, Opus 108 34
The Seasons, A Cantata, Opus 101 39
Summer: The Fragrant Pathway of Eternity, Opus 100 40
Spring: In the Pendulum of My Body, Opus 99 41
Duet from Holy Ghosts, Opus 93 42
Winter: Exaltations of Snowy Stars, Opus 929 43
Unchanging Love, a hymn based on a text by Romulus Linney, Opus 87 44
Fall: Autumnal Raptures, a song cycle for Tenor and Harp, Opus 86 46
Dream within a Dream, Opus 79 47
Songs of Time and Eternity, Opus 64 48
Shakespeare Sonnets, Opus 58 49
Ten Poems of William Blake, Opus 53 50
“The Immortal Beloved”, Opus 50 51
A Cry Against the Twilight, Opus 42 53
“Four Sacred Songs”, Opus 20 54
“Prologue” and “The End of the World”, Opus 14 56