Karim Al-Zand: Music: Vespertine Songs

Vespertine Songs

four songs for baritone & piano

Vespertine Songs are melodies of the night. Of an Evening is drawn from the descriptive prose of Charles Dickens (1812–1870), whose brooding evocation of a darkening city (mostly drawn from his novel Martin Chuzzlewit) emphasizes a timeless, cyclic quality. Marina Tsvetaeva’s (1892–1941) Insomnia has us wandering with a sleepless night owl and finding no solace in the streets. In Points and Lines Aldous Huxley (1894–1963) paints a beautiful metaphor of a night sky, a summer lake and the revelatory wonder of stars. “Anne Knish” is a pseudonym of Arthur Davison Ficke (1883–1945), a conservative American poet whose many “spectralist” poems like Nocturne parodied the imagist movement, represented by poets like Amy Lowell. Poetic irony then, that these are the only verses for which Ficke is now remembered. Nocturne is a nighttime soundscape of sorts: the enveloping noises of the evening fade into the distance, replaced by something even more magical.