Boykan's Sea Gardens I, compared to Sea Gardens II
Boykan's music strikes me as perfect for Hart Crane's sea of memory -- of "crystaline, pearl-hard gems of the before and after"..
Is the sea invigorating in the Whitman poem? I feel Boykan makes an acute change of mood for the Whitman setting. It has the spark of a scherzo, but I wish he could vary his textures and change his mode still more to get the difference that DH Lawrence is getting at --
"There is a poetry of this immediate present, instant poetry, as well as poetry of the infinite past and the infinite future. The seething poetry of the incarnate Now is supreme, beyond even the everlasting gems of the before and after. In its quivering momentaneity it surpasses the crystalline, pearl-hard jewels, the poems of the eternities.......There must be the rapid momentaneous association of things which meet and pass on the for ever incalculable journey of creation: everything left in its own rapid, fluid relationship with the rest of things.,...This is the unrestful, ungraspable poetry of the sheer present, poetry whose very permanency lies in its wind-like transit. Whitman's is the best poetry of this kind......"
Do we feel this DH Lawrence distinction in these two poems? -- the sea of memory in the Hart Crane poem, and an invigorating sea of the present in the Whitman poem?
Boykan's Whitman scherzo would benefit from the complete shift of strategy that we see him doing masterfully in his "Diptych" of 2013, twenty years after "Sea Gardens". I tried to describe this palpable expansion of Boykan's music, HERE.
"And Bees of Paradise" - Hart Crane
I had come all the way here from the sea,
Yet met the wave again between your arms
Where cliff and citadel – all verily
Dissolved within a sky of beacon forms –
Sea gardens lifted rainbow-wise through eyes I found.
Yes, tall, inseparably our days
Pass sunward. We have walked the kindled skies
Inexorable and girded with your praise,
By the dove filled, and bees of Paradise.
Sea Gardens II
"Cushion Me Soft" - from Walt Whitman's "Song of Myself"
Cushion me soft, rock me in billowy drowse,
Dash me with amorous wet, I can repay you.
Sea of stretch’d ground-swells,
Sea breathing broad and convulsive breaths,
Sea of the brine of life and of unshovell’d yet always-ready
Graves,
Howler and scooper of storms, capricious and dainty sea,
I am integral with you,
I too am of one phase and of all
Phases.
William Anderson
I compose, play plucked instruments, run ensembles, produce concerts, and advocate for new music, I soaked up contemporary American music for 30 years, working directly with composers from all over the map. In the last 20 years I began composing works that draw on that experience, with a particular concern for finding a coherent way to make reconciling musics that were sealed off from one another. How to make embarrassingly simple and charming music work with the most complex musical modalities? Tipping in this direction has made me aware of the dangers of grasping too firmly onto any one notion.
I've come to Macherey's vision that our shadow (what we're *not*) is radiantly present in our work. So it's perfectly reasonable to *love everything*. We're imbricated. --
**The true necessity of the text manifests itself in the fact that not a word of it can be changed and nothing can be added, even though it appears at each moment as though a new topic could be chosen, an alternative narrative selected. But it is precisely this ceaseless shadowy presence of other possible phrases which could be pronounced, this ineradicable sense that things could have been other than they are, which enforces the constraining necessity of the text we actually have before us.**--Macherey