SATB Choir (divisi)
Music by John Muehleisen
Poem by Brian Newhouse
Commissioned by The Singers and Artistic Director Matthew Culloton
with funding from the Katherine Guettler Memorial Gift,
with deepest gratitude for her legacy of sharing light and love in this world.
Duration: 7:30
Dawn Video credits: The SIngers conducted by Matthew Culloton on My Soul’s Repose concert at House of Hope Presbyterian Church in St. Paul, MN. March 24, 2024.
TEXT
Dawn
In that last hour
lay me,
lay me in my open field.
The blue above,
let it fall,
let it wash
all my striving away.
This earth,
soil that has never known fear,
never known war,
let it cradle me once again.
The dark will come.
Let it come.
And the glory of stars.
Let it come.
Sky,
Soil,
Stars…
And look now:
Dawn.
– Brian Newhouse
PROGRAM NOTES (abridged; see score for complete notes)
From the Poet
When your time comes, what do you hope for? Where are you? What hour of day is it? Too few of us get to make any of these decisions. I wanted at least to make my wishes clear. Though I’ve been lucky to live for years in a vibrant city, I was born and raised on a farm. No matter how long I am away from it, that place—the beauty of its smell after a spring rain, the spray of stars overhead on a summer night—will always be home. If I can, I’d like to meet eternity there. – Brian Newhouse
From the Composer
Dawn was commissioned in 2023 The Singers and their Artistic Director, Matthew Culloton, who I’ve known for over 20 years and who sang with the Dale Warland Singers in the first piece I ever composed for them and also during my tenure as Composer-in-Residence during their final 2003–2004 season. Although we’ve seen each other over the years at various conferences, this is our first time collaborating together in Matt’s role as Artistic Director of The Singers, a choral ensemble I’ve admired and appreciated for many years. In fact, this work is part of the commissions for their 20th Anniversary Season, which makes it all the more special.
When Matt approached me about the commission, he indicated that it was going to be scheduled on an annual concert they do each March titled “My Soul’s Repose,” which in 2024 features a performance of Herbert Howells’ stunning Requiem, a work that certainly sets the tone for all other works on the same program.With that in mind, in terms of finding an appropriate text, Matt suggested I contact Minnesota poet Brian Newhouse, who has provided texts for many well-known choral composers in recent years. That was a perfect suggestion because Brian and I had been looking for an opportunity to collaborate on a project for years. And here it was!
For me, a commission has no hint of music until I have a text, and then the creative juices begin to flow. When I find a text that really connects with me, I hear music from the first reading; while with other texts, it can be a bit more of an effort. But with Brian’s beautiful, exquisite, and deeply moving poem, the music flowed out of me so fast that it was a challenge to keep up with the steady stream of musical ideas I was hearing. You might even say that the music inherent in Brian’s poem “sang itself” to me. So I allowed the text and music to meld with one another in my musical imagination and just tried to transcribe and notate what I was hearing as quickly as possible. The result is a musical palette that ranges from the quality of an intimate folktune in the main opening theme—which recurs refrainlike several times in the work—to that of an expansive choral tone poem, most notably in the textless musical depiction of Brian’s final poetic image: “Dawn.” Along the way, the music serves to underscore the journey of the subject of the poem—someone in their final hour of life—facing death and eternity with such grace that it transforms the all-too-common fear of death into a vision of perceiving the immense beauty of the world—almost as if for the first time—and of practically merging with that beauty (“Sky, Soil, Stars…”), and even being swaddled by the grave, as if anticipating a new birth (“let it cradle me once again”). I tried my best to honor those beautiful, intimate, and emotional images in Brian’s poem by composing music that would embody those images and emotions and that would place each of us as listeners in the mind and even body of the subject of the poem on their journey to the infinite dawn, “In that last hour.” – John Muehleisen
NOTE: Conductors should feel free to use whatever information provided above that they think would be most meaningful to their audiences.