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Walden Songs: from "Spring"

from A Still Subtler Spirit by Monroe Golden

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about

In "Spring," the breaking down of words to their component parts and Greek origins, and the analogies of the macrocosmic awakening of the earth to the microcosmic budding of leaves, suggested gradually expanding musical structures. In all three songs, the vocal part is written in a harmonic tuning system, with certain pitches inflected 1/10 tone flat, 1/6 tone flat, 1/5 tone sharp, and 1/4 tone sharp. The piano notes are treated as relationships between the 3rd, 9th, 17th, 19th, and 27th partials, those being harmonics proximate to equal tempered pitches. An overtone-based tuning system seems especially appropriate for setting Thoreau, since it is based on natural laws of musical acoustics, and is itself a subversive movement, challenging the status quo of equal temperament.

lyrics

No wonder that the earth expresses itself outwardly in leaves, it so labors with the idea inwardly. The atoms have already learned this law, and are pregnant with it. The overhanging leaf sees here its prototype. Internally, whether in the globe or animal body, it is a moist thick lobe, a word especially applicable to the liver and lungs and the leaves of fat (* labor, lapsus, to flow or slip downward, a lapsing; ** , globus, lobe, globe; also lap, flap, and many other words); externally, a dry thin leaf, even as the f and v are a pressed and dried b. The radicals, of lobe are lb, the soft mass of the b (single-lobed, or B, double-lobed), with the liquid l behind it pressing it forward. In globe, glb, the guttural g adds to the meaning the capacity of the throat. The feathers and wings of birds are still drier and thinner leaves. Thus, also, you pass from the lumpish grub in the earth to the airy and fluttering butterfly. The very globe continually transcends and translates itself, and becomes winged in its orbit. Even ice begins with delicate crystal leaves, as if it had flowed into moulds which the fronds of water-plants have impressed on the watery mirror. The whole tree itself is but one leaf, and rivers are still vaster leaves whose pulp is intervening earth, and towns and cities are the ova of insects in their axils.

* the Greek letters lambda, epsilon, iota, beta, omega
** the Greek letters lambda, omega, beta, omega, sigma

credits

from A Still Subtler Spirit, released September 15, 2003
Adam Bowles, piano
Kathryn Venable, mezzo-soprano

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Monroe Golden Alabama

Monroe Golden is a composer from rural Alabama whose works explore microtonal systems, described by critics as “delightfully disorienting,” “lovely, sumptuous, yet arcane,” and “irresistible music, full of wit and beauty.” There are two prior dedicated audio releases of his music: A Still Subtler Spirit (Living Artist Recordings, 2003), and Alabama Places (innova Recordings, 2007). ... more

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