La Malinconia

Part of the reason tor the winter concert hiatus, beside the holidays and family gathering time, was a January composition deadline. I wrote Five Songs Without Words for the Stonybrook Contemporary Chamber Players, an ad hoc group of crack graduate students at SUNY-Stonybrook, for their annual premieres concert in April.

As the title promises, these songs have no words; they’re fully instrumental. But each carries a suggestive poetic epigraph. For the penultimate song, a pensive duet for violin and clarinet, I quoted a 19th-century Italian poem, La Malinconia, famously set to music by Vincenzo Bellini. This ode to Melancholy is not just a good fit for my piece, but also a remarkably apt description of my geographical life-arc—we spent years in the flatlands of the midwest feeling like exiles, aching to get to the mountains and to the northeast—and of my no-fly, Vermont-focused concert project and lifestyle. Fitting, as well, that the poet’s name, Pindemonte, appears to mean “mountain pine”.

Melancholy, gentle nymph, one who despises your pleasures is not born to true pleasures...
I asked the Gods for hills and springs; they heard me at last, I will live satisfied,
Never past that spring will my desires carry me, never beyond that hill.