O World Comes Home
This is a true story.
Early 2004 was a strange and busy time for my family and me. We’d been out of our home since the previous October, when a fire caused extensive smoke damage that required a lot of interior repairs. We’d managed to find another house to rent just up the road from ours, and were preparing to move back into our home.
My friend and colleague Dan Perkins had recently asked me to serve as the composer in residence for the newly-formed New Hampshire Master Chorale. They’d performed my composition Today at their Fall 2003 concert (information here), and they were due to premiere the first piece that I would write specifically for them at their Spring 2004 concert.
My wife, Marcia, and I worked at the same place, and had gotten into a regular routine at the end of each work day. We’d meet at our car, go pick up our kids from elementary school and day care, and then head for our rental house, stopping quickly on the way at our real house to pick up mail, assess how the repair work was coming along, and perhaps pick up a thing or two from the basement, which had not been damaged at all in the fire.
One day, while we were in the middle of our customary homeward loop, over half of a fully-formed choral composition just appeared in my head, as if from nowhere – no preliminary thought, no sketching, no mulling over of texts, nothing – just there. Moreover, though I sensed that I had read the text of the piece before, I didn’t recognize it – didn’t know the title of the text, who had written it, etc. When we got to our real house for mail pickup, I asked Marcia if it would be okay for her to wait in the driveway with the kids while I ran into the basement, turned on our computer, and Internet-searched lines of this text that had suddenly set itself in my head. As it turned out, it was a poem by Edna St. Vincent Millay that begins with the words “O WORLD, I cannot hold thee close enough!”
The completed piece, which came to me with the title O World, was premiered by Dan and the NHMC in April 2004. I think it was a song of gratitude for the place we live, and for the friends we’ve made here. It was eventually published under another title, but I’m really glad to have recovered the copyright for the piece so that I can issue it under the title that came to me so uncannily, along with everything else about it, so many years ago. For more information about O World, including links to audio of the premiere and an excerpt of the score, click here.
Early 2004 was a strange and busy time for my family and me. We’d been out of our home since the previous October, when a fire caused extensive smoke damage that required a lot of interior repairs. We’d managed to find another house to rent just up the road from ours, and were preparing to move back into our home.
My friend and colleague Dan Perkins had recently asked me to serve as the composer in residence for the newly-formed New Hampshire Master Chorale. They’d performed my composition Today at their Fall 2003 concert (information here), and they were due to premiere the first piece that I would write specifically for them at their Spring 2004 concert.
My wife, Marcia, and I worked at the same place, and had gotten into a regular routine at the end of each work day. We’d meet at our car, go pick up our kids from elementary school and day care, and then head for our rental house, stopping quickly on the way at our real house to pick up mail, assess how the repair work was coming along, and perhaps pick up a thing or two from the basement, which had not been damaged at all in the fire.
One day, while we were in the middle of our customary homeward loop, over half of a fully-formed choral composition just appeared in my head, as if from nowhere – no preliminary thought, no sketching, no mulling over of texts, nothing – just there. Moreover, though I sensed that I had read the text of the piece before, I didn’t recognize it – didn’t know the title of the text, who had written it, etc. When we got to our real house for mail pickup, I asked Marcia if it would be okay for her to wait in the driveway with the kids while I ran into the basement, turned on our computer, and Internet-searched lines of this text that had suddenly set itself in my head. As it turned out, it was a poem by Edna St. Vincent Millay that begins with the words “O WORLD, I cannot hold thee close enough!”
The completed piece, which came to me with the title O World, was premiered by Dan and the NHMC in April 2004. I think it was a song of gratitude for the place we live, and for the friends we’ve made here. It was eventually published under another title, but I’m really glad to have recovered the copyright for the piece so that I can issue it under the title that came to me so uncannily, along with everything else about it, so many years ago. For more information about O World, including links to audio of the premiere and an excerpt of the score, click here.
