solo voice(s)+2 to 6 instruments

The Wild Swans at Coole (1993)

Yeats has spent nineteen summers at Coole Park, home of his great friend and co-founder of the Abbey Theatre, Lady Augusta Gregory. He is now fifty-one years old.

He writes, “All’s changed”… His tread is heavy. He is no longer in love with Maude Gonne and feels incapable of passion. He feels like an old man. But the hearts of the swans “have not grown old”. They passionately inhabit two worlds, the sky and the water. Theirs is a changeless pattern that goes on forever, always remaining at fifty- nine swans, even though individual swans may die. They symbolize immortality. Yeats ends the poem with a question. Where will they go? Who will be delighted some day by their presence? Where will Yeats be?

One year later, Yeats married Georgie Hyde-Leeds. He felt his life was finally “in order” and went on to write some of his finest poems and win the Nobel Prize.

The Shadow-like Generations (1992)

This poem by Yeats is a paraphrase of commentary made by the chorus of Elders in Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex.

Metaxu is a Greek word for the boundary between the material and spiritual worlds. The passage through is possible by meditation as well as music. My interest in women mystics and stumbling upon Weil’s book inspired the piece, which took shape as a work for two new faculty members, Sharon Campbell and Noah Rogoff. The melodic and harmonic resources grow from a group of set classes from (0167) to (01267) and (012367). The textures, use of the sets in embedded layers, soloistic searching melodies in the cello, and especially in #4, Metaxu, the crossing of the voice and cello parts, with the voice and cello basically on top of each other, are meant to symbolize the image of metaxu and bring out the liminal qualities of the music.

Mitchell_Metaxu.mp3