La Melanconia, or, My Project in 50 Words*

There is only one Play Every Town concert this April because I took on several non-PET engagements for a change. 

One was the performance of a piece I wrote for the Stony Brook Contemporary Chamber Players’ annual premieres concert in Long Island and NYC. (Amtrak runs not one but two train lines between NW Vermont and NYC.) I called my piece Five Songs Without Words. But I included a short poetic epigraph before each “wordless” song…trying to have it both ways, I guess. The fourth song, “Malincolia”, is prefaced by an Italian Romantic pastoral, “La Melanconia”, in translation:

Melancholy, gentle Nymph,

I dedicate my life to you.

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 mountain.   

I attached the text after I composed the music, and I chose it to fit the mood. But it’s also an on-the-nose description of my life arc: first finding my way to Vermont after almost five decades in flatter, drier, less glorious places; then my decision not to fly and to stick close to my new home, to these modest but awe-inspiring mountains and springs. 

As I’ve said here and at most of my concerts, staying close has been more of an enrichment than a privation. There’s no denying it comes with a humbling sense of contraction, a melancholic touch; yet within that there’s a new kind of contentment in accepting the boundaries of a smaller but richly varied world. (This happy/sad turning away from the greater world is the archetypical theme of the pastoral poetic tradition.)

The poet, Ippolito Pindemonte, captured all that in eight short lines. Pindemonte most likely means “mountain pine”, and the feast day of Saint Hippolytus, for whom he is presumably named, is August 13, my birthday.  

*46 in the original Italian