Albert Glinsky

SATB Choir

Composer's Note:

Tor House is set to a poem of the same name by the American poet, Robinson Jeffers (1887-1962).  Jeffers was a proto-environmentalist, and much of his work addresses our human footprint on nature.  Jeffers built an elaborate stone dwelling for himself with his own hands on the California coast at Carmel by rolling granite boulders up from the sea just 50 yards below his property.  He christened the structure Tor House, after the rocky promontories, or “tors,” he’d seen in England.  Though it was a naturally constructed human abode, he knew that even its stone-crafted architectural form would surrender to the inevitable forces of nature over the coming centuries.  His poem, "Tor House" speaks of the erosion of man-made structures over time, and how ultimately the ocean and the natural world will remain long after we, and the names we assign to geographical places, will disappear.  

In this choral setting, the sustained texture in the choir, and the extended wordless phrases are meant to invoke the ocean, the wind, and the eternal passage of time and the elements.  

About Robinson Jeffers and the Tor House

Jeffers found solace at Carmel-by-the-Sea in the primordial, elemental beauty of the unspoiled land that existed for millennia, before the march of time and civilization.  On his remote, barren hill where Tor House stood, overlooking the ocean with its rocky promontories, he also built the 40-foot-tall stone Hawk Tower, with a spiral staircase, four levels, and an open turret affording spectacular views of Carmel Bay.  His wife recalled how each night he walked outside, “watching the stars in their courses, marking the rising or setting of the Constellations and feeling the direction of the wind and noticing the tides at ebb or flow.” At Tor House Jeffers found his voice as a poet, sheltering in a private mystical world.  The naturalist Lauren Eisely remembered, “I felt in his presence... an impression that I had been speaking with someone out of time, an oracle who would presently withdraw among the nearby stones and pinewood.”  Jeffers himself felt a profound synergy with the granite—its coldness, its embodiment of the prehistoric origins of earth, and its universal symbol of the perpetuity of nature and the cosmos.  In his poem “Tor House” he muses that his ghost will someday reside “deep in the granite.”