In honor of the 2024 solar eclipse that passed right over us here in Vermont, I wrote two songs (the other one is Eclipse).
This one is a setting of a poem by Ella Wheeler Wilcox (1850-1919). In the section that begins with the line, “Sometimes such passionate love doth in her rise…,” the lower voices represent the light of the sun being occluded by the moon as the eclipse proceeds.
When I first wrote the piece, I assumed the sun’s light fades away gradually, so I had the lower voices gradually fade out. But then I experienced the actual eclipse, and observed that totality isn’t a gradual fade-out, but rather an abrupt shift: the remaining direct sunlight disappears suddenly. So when we performed the piece I instructed the lower voices to stop abruptly at the end of the line “And with her mantle veils the Sun’s bold eyes.” Don’t miss that moment!