Songs for Married Lovers

Contents

Vocal solos with harp
The Anniversary (John Donne)
In the End We Are All Light (Liz Rosenberg)
My Muse, Now Happy (Lady Mary Wroth)
All of Our Books (John Anderson)
A Marriage (R. S. Thomas)
Flute Score for “A Marriage”
The Catch (Richard Wilbur)
An Enzyme Poem for Suzanne (Paul Zimmer)
In a Little Room (Michael Palma)
Self‐Portrait after Stanley Spencer John Wood)

Vocal Duets with harp
Sonnet from Gaudy Night (Dorothy Sayers)
Book Lice (Paul Fleischman)
The Weathers of Love, 1 (Paul Zimmer)
The Weathers of Love, 2 (Paul Zimmer)
Before I Even Noticed (Michael Palma)

Notes from the Composer

It’s rare and wonderful to encounter a poem or a song about being married for a long and happy time. This book is a collection of musical settings of some of those rare poems on happy marriages that I have encountered and treasured over the years. There are some works by earlier poets here, such as John Donne, whose own happy marriage has always been famous. I am deeply grateful to the living poets who have given me permission to use such tender, personal, and sometimes very private poems in this collection. The two fictional lovers in Dorothy Sayers’ mystery Gaudy Night aren’t yet married when they write the sonnet I’ve included here, but, as readers of Dorothy Sayers know, they will share a long and happy marriage. Following what she tells us about the vocal ranges of her lovers, Harriet Vane and Lord Peter Wimsey, I’ve scored the duet for alto and tenor. And since Bach’s Concerto for Two Violins plays a significant part in the final scenes of the novel (and in the courtship of the characters), my setting uses brief musical quotations from that work. My own definition of marriage is a very liberal and non-traditional one. I hope performers will feel free to alter pronouns and raise or lower octaves, a piacere. All of the accompaniments can be played on the keyboard or easily adapted for it, but the suggested fingerings will be of no help at all to any keyboard players. Harpists, please note that the system I follow here is that numbers beneath the notes indicate fingers of the left hand, and numbers above the notes are for the right hand.

– Carol Wood