John Melby

Soprano and Pre-Recorded Sound (2, 4, or 8 Channels)

Composer's Note:

Amy Lawrence Lowell, an American poet of the “imagist” school, was born in Brookline, Massachusetts, on February 9, 1874, and died there unexpectedly of a cerebral hemorrhage at 51 on May 12, 1925. In the year following her death, she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry posthumously. Lowell was one of several illustrious members of a prominent Boston family: one of her brothers, Percival Lowell, was a famous astronomer who predicted the existence of the now-demoted planet Pluto, and another brother, Abbott Lawrence Lowell, became President of Harvard University. (Other members of this distinguished family have included the poet and critic James Russell Lowell and the poet Robert Lowell.) Though Amy Lowell herself did not attend college because of the prevailing attitude at the time regarding the education of women, she began educating herself by voracious reading in her family’s collection of over 7,000 books. Lowell was known as an eccentric and formidable figure whose lesbianism was only one manifestation of her unconventionality and her rebellion against her distinguished Boston lineage; her unusual appearance (she was greatly overweight because of a glandular problem) was heightened by her habit of smoking cigars almost constantly, claiming that because they lasted longer than cigarettes, they took less time away from her work. She began to write poetry in 1902 and her first published work appeared in 1910 in the Atlantic Monthly. The first published collection of her poetry appeared two years later (see below). She subsequently became one of the most famous and widely-read American poets of her time. Following her death, her work became quite unfashionable and was largely forgotten. However, recent years have seen a marked resurgence of interest in her poetry.

Aftermath is a setting in one uninterrupted movement for soprano and computer-synthesized sounds of three poems by the American poet Amy Lowell (1874-1925): “Frankincense and Myrrh,” “Dreams,” and “The End,” all three of which are found in the first published volume of her poetry, A Dome of Many-Coloured Glass, which appeared in 1912, and all of which deal with the subject of lost love. (The British spellings in the texts represent those of the poet.) Ironically, I had originally planned to set four of Lowell’s poems, one of which, “Aftermath,” was to have provided the title for the set — but because the length of the work would have exceeded my desired goal, I was forced to make the decision to omit one of them, and “Aftermath” was the unlucky loser. However, since I liked the title, and since I felt it was nevertheless fitting, I decided to keep the name, if not the poem. The work was composed in 2009 for soprano Patricia Sonego.