Twilight as a New Choir’s Dawn: “Dusk in June” Program Notes
When building out an idea of a program, I often start with a “keystone” piece—one that I know deeply and want to showcase, in this case “Twilight Hours” by Gregory Brown—and build outward, primarily through texts on similar content and theme. The themes present in Carl Sadakichi Hartmann’s poem (I should not have been surprised to find) appear abundantly across choral and vocal repertoire, and in romantic and modern poetry, allowing this program to blossom quickly and organically. So many artists are fascinated with the almost-night sky: the way the natural world transitions, its liminality, and how these changes seem to reflect and inspire the human experience.
“Courage” at Mt. Vernon Place, Baltimore (statue by Paul Dubois)
Twilight is indeed unsurprising as an object of artistic contemplation. It’s both common and widely shared, and yet it’s often surprisingly beautiful every time we notice it again. Twilight is a mood shift on the terrestrial and celestial levels that can feel like a dazzling dessert for enduring the long, bright day, or it can be like a sultry appetizer for the excitement or the calm of the night.
In these poems, various authors find twilight, and themselves, inextricably connected to nature, even to the point of hallucination (as in the case of Heinrich Heine’s “Wandl’ich in dem Wald des Abend”). It’s through this linkage that they find twilight an inevitable metaphor for endings in their own lives—for death, loss of love, or loss of innocence. Endings like these are painful and melancholic, and our composers express such feelings through their artistry: from Fanny Hensel’s stark descending unisons, to Gabriela Lena Frank’s searching, textless and fragmented melismas, to Gregory Brown’s interplay of fractured duets. All these pieces bring musical life to already rich poetry to reflect on how the great movements of the heavens affect our souls and are played out in our lives.
Twilight is a time of change and transition. As painful and mysterious as change may be, twilight is a beautiful reminder of the vastness and cyclical-ness of nature to which we belong, to which all our pains and joys belong. I am comforted to know that I have seen changes like these before, as centuries of others have before me and as billions of others do beside me. Comforting too is knowing, as cliché as it is, endings are needed for new beginnings; every dusk leads to another dawn. I thank you for joining us through this particular passage of twilight, that we may together reflect on what has ended and what is about to begin.