- Mark Adamo
Pied Beauty (1998)
- G Schirmer Inc (World)
- SATB a cappella
- 4 min
- Gerard Manley Hopkins
- English
Programme Note
Text:
Gerard Manley Hopkins
Composer Note:
Pied Beauty was the first poem I ever set indeed, the piece I ever composed that ventured off the theatre songwriting path which had led me to music to begin with. What strikes me about Hopkins' language is how lavish and ardent it is: there's a wonderful tension in Pied Beauty between the formality of the quatrains and the rhyme schemes and their headlong, million-color imagery. It seemed natural, then, to embed the poem in comparably polychrome harmonies while respecting the symmetry and grace of its phrases: to make of it a modest motet, as opposed to the dramatic scena of God’s Grandeur, the second Hopkins poem on ecstatic themes that I set for choir (and, in that case, piano.)
Mark Adamo
Gerard Manley Hopkins
Composer Note:
Pied Beauty was the first poem I ever set indeed, the piece I ever composed that ventured off the theatre songwriting path which had led me to music to begin with. What strikes me about Hopkins' language is how lavish and ardent it is: there's a wonderful tension in Pied Beauty between the formality of the quatrains and the rhyme schemes and their headlong, million-color imagery. It seemed natural, then, to embed the poem in comparably polychrome harmonies while respecting the symmetry and grace of its phrases: to make of it a modest motet, as opposed to the dramatic scena of God’s Grandeur, the second Hopkins poem on ecstatic themes that I set for choir (and, in that case, piano.)
Mark Adamo