This Sunset Land
song cycle for solo soprano and orchestra
This Sunset Land was commissioned by Symphony Hamilton,
James McKay, music director, for the celebration of the 1996 sesquicentennial of the founding of the city of Hamilton, Ontario, Canada. The title reflects a European perspective toward a land promising "acres of your own", new life, independence, and prosperity, and is taken from two lines written near the end of the 19th century by Frederick G. Scott:
All the future lies before us
Glorious in that sunset land.
Water and land are themes that run through This Sunset Land. They are simultaneously goal and barrier, objects of attraction and mystery, and sources of insurmountable challenge, fear and death.
The work is in five movements, the central one being for orchestra alone, entitled "Water". Around this movement, the first and final are based on nineteenth century texts, first celebrating the hopes and then honouring the accomplishments of the pioneers; the second and fourth movements use more introspective contemporary texts, focusing in the second movement on land and in the fourth on water.
The music of the "pioneer" texts (I and V) intentionally recalls those times, while the contemporary texts are set in a more current idiom.
The commission was supported with funding from the Ontario Arts Council. The cycle was premiered 9 November 1996 at Mohawk Theatre, Hamilton Ontario Canada by Symphony Hamilton; Elizabeth Peters, soprano; James McKay, director.
IAcres of your own
Here's the road to independence!
Who would bow and dance attendance?
Who, with e'er a spark of pride,
While the bush is wild and wide,
Would be but a hanger-on.
Begging favours from a throne,
While beneath yon smiling sun
Farms, by labour, can be won?
Up! be stirring, be alive,
Get upon a farm and thrive!
Be a king upon a throne
Having acres of your own!
Tho' the cabin walls are bare,
What of that, if love is there?
What although your back is bent,
There is none to hound for rent;
What tho' you must chip and plough,
None dare ask, "What doest thou?"
What though homespun be your coat,
Kings might envy you your lot!
Up! be stirring, be alive,
Get upon a farm and thrive!
Be a king upon a throne
Having acres of your own!
… by Alexander M'Lachlan, altered by LE. M'Lachlan came to Canada from Scotland in 1840 at the age of 20, living here as farmer and poet. He had a farm at Amaranth, Ontario.
II A pioneer place
Where I walk
myriad other feet have
trod the founding years,
these blue-green hills, this
perfect sky were here
for them as they are for me.
And did they too
marvel at this majesty
or were their backs too bent
with toil for them to see?
This bright cavalcade –
passing specks upon the
pane of time
yet they left their mark
indelible as the landscape,
each hewn stone of the old house
remembers the shape of a hand.
Filaments of souls reach out,
touch this land
and time, reversing
stirs again, like
generations in my veins.
…by Betty Sanders Garner (used by permission of the author)
III Water (orchestra)
In its pivotal position within the five movements, this third one acknowledges the central role of water in the life of Hamilton and Canada itself--as source of transportation, power, renewal, recreation, and sheer beauty. Although, in general, the music does not imitate water in a direct way, its shape and energy are inspired by various conditions and behaviors of water. And, as water may function both as a mirror and a window, so the movementrecalls the energetic beginning of the first movement and anticipates the more introspective nature of the fourth.
IV Conceptions
You said you couldn't
understand how I could
so dislike the sea
When you think of the sea
your spirits soar
free with the gulls
and wind-filled sails
You do not hear
souls of lost sailors
moaning in the deep
and endless
chilling
doom
When I think of the sea
my soul shivers
…by Betty Sanders Garner (used by permission of the author)
V Thanksgiving
Let all who in leisured ease
Walk these city squares,
Thank those who braved rocks and trees,
The howling wolves and bears.
They met the proud woods in the face,
Those gloomy shades and stern;
Withstood and conquered, and your race
Supplants the pine and fern.
Though plain their lives and rude their dress,
No common folk were they;
Some came for scorn of slavishness
From homelands far away;
And some came here for conscience' sake,
For Empire and the King;
And some for Love a home to make,
Their dear ones here to bring.
A dream, and then a home,
Soon a settlement!
E'er long both the spire and dome
The misty sky indent!
So honoured be they midst your ease,
And give them well their due;
Give thanks to those who crossed the seas,
They made a land for you!
…adapted by LE fromWilliam Douw Lighthall, born in Hamilton in 1857. Lighthall published a variety of political essays, poems and stories dealing with conditions in the young nation.