This World is not Conclusion

Commissioned in 1998 by the New Music Festival of Sandusky, This World is not Conclusion is comprised of four movements for chorus, string orchestra, and clarinet on poems by Emily Dickinson: Crisis Is A Hair, We Like March, This World is not Conclusion, and Heart! We will forget him!

Although these movements are structurally and stylistically related, each piece can stand on its own.
My writing for the chorus here, like in my USA Stories, attempts to create the illusion of a single, complex, reverberated voice, each choral part contributing to the sense of mass through repetition, imitation, hocket, and the avoidance of rhythmic unison.

This World is not Conclusion
(four poems of Emily Dickinson)

1.
Crisis is a Hair
Toward which the forces creep
Past which forces retrograde
If it come in sleep
To suspend the Breath
Is the most we can
Ignorant is it Life or Death
Nicely balancing.
Let an instant push
Or an Atom press
Or a Circle hesitate
In Circumference
It – may jolt the Hand
That adjusts the Hair
That secures Eternity
From presenting – Here –
[ca. 1864]

2.
We like March—his shoes are Purple.
He is new and high—
Makes he mud for Dog and Peddler—
Makes he Forests Dry—
Knows the Adder’s Tongue his coming
And begets her spot—
Stands the Sun so close and mighty—
That our Minds are hot.
News is he of all the others—
Bold it were to die
With the Blue Birds buccaneering
On his British sky—
[version of 1878]

3.
This World is not Conclusion
A Species stands beyond—
Invisible as Music—
But positive as Sound—
It beckons, and it baffles—
Philosophy—don’t know—
And through a Riddle, at the last—
Sagacity, must go—
To guess it, puzzles scholars—
To gain it, Men have borne
Contempt of Generations
And Crucifixion, shown—
Faith slips—and laughs, and rallies—
Blushes, if any see—
Plucks at a twig of Evidence—
And asks a Vane, the way—
Much Gesture, from the Pulpit—
Stong Hallelujahs roll—
Narcotics cannot still the Tooth
That nibbles at the soul—
[ca. 1862]