Time, Is...

A creative, short collegiate level work for mezzo soloist and SATB a cappella choir. Drawn to the theme of remembrance and with a desire to introduce my choir to music with a bit more dissonance and lesson common musical techniques, such as aleatoric, I chose to set this well-known Henry Van Dyke poem. The poem was originally written to be inscribed on a sundial and was published in the 1904 collection "Music and Other Poems." More recently, the poem was read aloud at the funeral of Princess Diana in 1997. The opening solo, in an a cappella, semi-gospel, style should be sung slowly, with deliberate elaboration on words such as "long" and "short", etc. Above all, don't rush and let the text speak.