Allaudin Mathieu, a composer living in Sebastopol California, and a longtime friend of Snyder, wrote us a captivating and eclectic song cycle titled (somewhat amusingly, cf. Frith) For All. We offer the eponymous final song from this cycle:
Ah to be alive
on a mid-September morn
fording a stream
barefoot, pants rolled up,
holding boots, pack on,
sunshine, ice in the shallows,
northern rockies.
Rustle and shimmer of icy creek waters
stones turn underfoot, small and hard as toes
cold nose dripping
singing inside
creek music, heart music,
smell of sun on gravel.
I pledge allegiance
I pledge allegiance to the soil
of Turtle Island,
[and to the beings who thereon dwell]
one ecosystem
in diversity
under the sun
With joyful interpenetration for all.
Fred Frith, a composer teaching at Mills College in Oakland CA and an improvisational instrumentalist (he has done stunning work with Evelyn Glynnie, John Zorn and others) wrote us a song cycle, For Nothing, which uses some of Gary Snyder’s translations of the poems of the 8th century Chinese mystic poet Han Shan. We offer the third section from this cycle:
My home was at Cold Mountain from the start,
Rambling among the hills, far from trouble.
Gone, and a million things leave no trace
Loosed, and it flows through the galaxies
A fountain of light, into the very mind--
Not a thing, and yet it appears before me:
Now I know the pearl of the Buddha-nature
Know its use: a boundless perfect sphere.
—a poem of incomparable depth. As Gary Snyder said in his introductory remarks for our 2009 concert at the Grass Valley Center for the Arts: “Cold Mountain refers not only to a mountain in the Tien Tai range, and the name of the poet, but also a state of mind—detached, an enlightened way of seeing the world.”
Roy Whelden, composer and viola da gamba performer with the Galax Quartet, used Snyder’s translation of another Han Shan poem, here titled Like a Passing River, to create a short song written in a popular style. (This poem was specifically requested by Snyder to be included in our San Francisco concert of 2008.)
I have lived at Cold Mountain
These thirty long years.
Yesterday I called on friends and family:
More than half had gone to the Yellow Springs.
Slowly consumed, like fire down a candle;
Forever flowing, like a passing river.
Now, morning, I face my lone shadow:
Suddenly my eyes are bleared with tears.
Eighty years ago this month, in May of 1930, the American Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Gary Snyder was born in San Francisco. He has been called the poet of deep ecology, a Beat poet and a Zen poet. He has taken inspiration from Native American stories, Chinese landscape painting, hiking, coyotes and Tibetan deities.
In 2008 the Galax Quartet, with the contralto Karen Clark, premiered the works of four composers commissioned to write song cycles for voice and strings based on Snyder’s poetry. They have now been recorded.
In celebration of Mr. Snyder’s 80th birthday, we wish to offer freely to public radio stations any or all of four selections from these new pieces.. If you enjoy what you hear on the movie/audio files below, go to the downloads page to retrieve the audio files for broadcast.
(We wish to thank the American Composers Forum, the Zellerbach Family Fund, and the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation for financially supporting these commissions.)
Robert Morris, a composer at the Eastman School of Music and a longtime admirer of Snyder’s work and life, created This Bubble of a Heart, a deeply felt song cycle sui generis. We offer the middle two movements from this cycle, beginning with an instrumental Shaman Dance and following with a sphinx-like poem perfectly reflected by the music:
Faint new moon arc, curl,
Again in the west. Blue eve,
Deer-moving dusk.
Purple shade in a plant-realm--
a million years of sniffs,
licks, lip and
reaching tongue.