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Songs of Innocence
Jean Danton, soprano
Dominick Argento
Six Elizabethan Songs
Songs About Spring
Arnold Cooke
Three Songs of Innocence
Nocturnes
William Moylan
For A Sleeping Child -
Lullabies & Midnight Musings
Jean Danton
Soprano Jean Danton has performed extensively throughout the United States in recitals, oratorio and opera. She has appeared as soloist with the Handel and Haydn Society under Christopher Hogwood, Oregon Bach Festival conducted by Helmuth Rilling, the Boston Pops led by Bruce Hangen and Boston Baroque with Martin Pearlman. Her many festival engagements include the Carmel Bach Festival, Winter Park Bach Festival, Breckenridge Music Festival, New York Bach Aria Festival, and the Boston Early Music Festival.
A graduate of the Hartt School of Music in opera, Ms. Danton's operatic roles range from Monteverdi to Mozart, Rossini, Menotti and Douglas Moore. Her Baroque roles include the premiere of Quiteria in Telemann's Don Quixote with Harry Ellis Dickson and the Boston Classical Orchestra. Also trained in musical theatre, she has appeared on stage in roles as diverse as Nanette in No No Nanette at Shea's Theatre in Buffalo, and Polly Peachum in Kurt Weill's The Three Penny Opera under Craig Smith at the American Repertory Theatre.
In her work as a recording artist, she can be heard on PBS television documentaries The Nobel Legacy and Apollo 13-To the Edge and Back, and on Mary Magdalen for Lifetime. As a recitalist, Ms. Danton has premiered works by American composers Sharon Davis and Thomas Stumpf, and recorded several other works by William Moylan at the Banff Center for the Arts in Canada.
Dominick Argento
Born in York, Pennsylvania on October 27, 1927, the son of Italian immigrants, Dominick Argento has given central place to the human voice in his works over the past forty years. As one biographer has observed, even his purely orchestral writings reflect his belief that musical instruments are essentially imitators of the voice. Although he came of age with the post war avant-garde, Argento remained aloof from the preoccupation of his contemporaries with abstraction and experimentation, choosing instead to develop a personal style characterized by lyricism, melody and color. Particularly distinguished for his operas, choral works and song cycles, Argento has examined fame and the immigrant experience in his latest work, The Dream of Valentino, premiered by the Washington Opera in 1994. With degrees from the Peabody Conservatory and Eastman School, and following two extended periods of private study in Florence, Italy, he has been a member of the Department of Music faculty at the University of Minnesota since 1958. Among his many honors, Argento was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Music in 1975 for his song cycle From the Diary of Virginia Woolf.
Six Elizabethan Songs
Six Elizabethan Songs exists in two versions: the first written in Florence in 1957 for tenor and piano accompaniment; the second revised by the composer in 1962 for soprano and baroque ensemble (flute, oboe, cello, violin and harpsichord). Argento has written: "The songs are called 'Elizabethan' because the lyrics are drawn from that rich period in literature, while the music is in the spirit (if not the manner) of the great English composer-singer-lutenist John Dowland. The main concern is the paramount importance of the poetry and the primacy of the vocal line over a relatively simple and supportive accompaniment."
Songs About Spring
This song cycle for soprano and piano is a setting of five poems by E.E. Cummings on the theme of spring, full of vivid, brilliant, joyful, childlike imagery. The third poem of the group "in Just-spring," was a favorite of Cummings himself, who often selected it for public reading. Although the language is modern, these poems in feeling and spirit are often very like Blake's Songs of Innocence. If we substitute the word poet for composer, what one critic has written about Argento could well apply also to Cummings: "What a pleasure to encounter a real composer, one who has studied and learned from his predecessors, loves the form, understands its conventions, has mastered them, and then lets his imagination take wing.
Arnold Cooke
The English composer Arnold Cooke was born in Gomersal, Yorkshire on November 4, 1906. He studied with Edward Dent at Caius College, Cambridge, and with Paul Hindemith in Berlin at the Hochschule für Musik (1929-32). After serving briefly as Director of Music at the Festival Theatre, Cambridge, he was a Professor of Harmony and counterpoint at the Royal College of Music in Manchester (1933-38). He joined the staff of Trinity College of Music (London in 1947), and took his Mus.D. at Cambridge a year later. Starting in the 1950's, his compositions have enjoyed a growing number of performances, the chamber music making a particularly strong impression. His other works include two operas, the ballet Jabez and the Devil, six symphonies, five concertos, an organ sonata, and the song cycles Three Songs of Innocence and Nocturnes.
Three Songs of Innocence
In Three Songs of Innocence, Cooke has set three poems from William Blake's Songs of Innocence (1789) for soprano, clarinet and piano. The first two poems are fairly straightforward pastoral scenes. In the first, the poet, represented by a shepherd piping his happy songs, is directed by a child on a cloud to write them down "that all may read" and "every child may joy to hear." In both, the child and the lamb are symbols of innocence as well as Christianity, and innocence may be read as both the innocence of youth and the innocent in heart. The third poem, "The Echoing Green," contains darker undertones as it contrasts youth and age, joys present and joys past, the sunlit green and the darkening green.
Nocturnes
Cooke has selected texts by five British poets for his song cycle Nocturnes. Appropriately, they are all night scenes. Underlying them all are traditional symbols of night, a mood of isolation (Shelley's moon "wandering companionless among the stars": Tennyson's owl who "alonein the belfry sits"); a sense of impending doom (by the banks of Lawrence's river Isar, where "glimmering fear was abroad"; on the "poison-blasted" World War I battlefield sketched by Rosenberg, where "death could drop from the dark as easily as song"); and a knowledge that death cannot be delayed (as Davidson writes "we must leave too soonto reach a land unknown").
Shelley, Tennyson, and D.H. Lawrence are well-known to us. The English writer Isaac Rosenberg (1890-1918) is best known for his poems that deal with his experiences as a soldier in the trenches of World War I. He was killed in military action in France. Though John Davidson (1857-1909), Scottish educator, translator, journalist, poet and playwright, won the praises of T.S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf, he knew little success in his lifetime. Plagued by financial worries and feeling that he had failed as a writer, he apparently committed suicide while living in isolation at the British seaside resort of Penzance.
William Moylan
William Moylan (b. 1956) is Coordinator of Sound Recording Technology, Director of the Center for Recording Arts, Technology & Industry and Professor of Music and Sound Recording Technology at the University of Massachusetts Lowell. Moylan has been an educator in the disciplines of music technology and audio recording since 1979. He has served on the faculty of the Aspen Music School's Audio-Recording Institute, and has designed curricula in recording programs for a variety of institutions, including the Aspen Audio Recording Institute, and the University of Massachusetts Lowell.
William Moylan holds the Doctor of Arts degree from Ball State University, Master of Music degree from the University of Toronto, and the Bachelor of Music degree from the Peabody Conservatory of Music of the Johns Hopkins University, all in music composition.
Moylan's early musical experiences were centered in the violin and guitar, and later on the double bass. While in secondary school, he studied voice, piano and brass instruments, and received formal education in music theory, ear training and music history. During these formative years as a musician he worked intimately in a wealth of musical traditions and styles. Since early in his career, he has utilized technology in his music and music making.
His compositions have been performed by leading artists and ensembles throughout the United States, Canada, Europe, and Japan. Moylan has written for nearly all musical media and has more than 40 compositions published by Seesaw Music, Future Echoes Music, and Roncorp, Inc. His music has appeared on the Opus One and Breathing Space labels.
The music of William Moylan is a fluid and unique blend of European art music traditions, contemporary classical music, popular and folk musics. His most recent music often uses materials and sound qualities only available through modern recording techniques and technologies.
For A Sleeping Child Lullabies and Midnight Musings
For A Sleeping Child Lullabies and Midnight Musings was written for Jean Danton, specifically for this "Songs of Innocence" recording. This cycle of four songs was written in October of 1995 and revised in January of 1996.
The work seeks to bridge the worlds of the recital hall and the personal space or "chamber" of our contemporary lifestyle: the "living room." Traditional approaches to musical composition (incorporating the drama of the stage) are present in the work, and it is intended to be performed live in the recital hall. It was also intended that the recording of this work would communicate an intimacy and immediacy of musical materials and sound qualities possible only in music recordings.
For A Sleeping Child Lullabies and Midnight Musings moves through an evening and night of activities centered around a child's sleeping. The songs' texts are traditional poems (with unknown dates of origin) from Europe, from African immigrants in the Southern United States, and from a Native American nation, and a Nineteenth century text from mainstream America. This diversity allows the cycle
to reach across time and culture to observe and celebrate some of the most fundamental of human experiences.
Produced by William Moylan · Engineered by James Donahue · Edited by William Moylan and Michael Breault ·Mastered by James Donahue and William Moylan ·Final Preparation by Laurie Flannery, Northeastern Digital Recording · Recorded at The Music Room, Cambridge, Massachusetts · Photograph of Jean Danton by Lianne M. Lentini at the John Whipple House, Ipswich, Massachusetts.
Dominick Argento
Six Elizabethan Songs
Springs
Spring, the sweet spring, is the year's pleasant king:
Then blooms each thing, then maids dance in a ring,
Cold doth not sting, the pretty birds do sing,
cuckoo, jug-jug, towitta woo!
The palm and may make country houses gay,
Lambs frisk and play, the shepherd pipes all day,
And we hear aye birds tune this merry lay,
cuckoo, jug-jug, pu-we, towitta woo!
The fields breathe sweet, the daisies kiss our feet,
Young lovers meet, old wives a sunning sit
In every street, these tunes our ears do greet,
Cuckoo, jug-jug, pu-we, towitta woo!
Spring, the sweet Spring!
Thomas Nash
Sleep
Care-charmer Sleep, son of the sable Night,
Brother to Death, in silent darkness born,
Relieve my anguish and restore thy light,
With dark forgetting of my care return.
And let the day be time enough to mourn
The shipwreck of my ill-adventured youth:
Let waking eyes suffice to wail their scorn
Without the torment of the night's untruth.
Cease, dreams, the images of day-desires
To model forth the passions of the morrow;
Never let rising sun approve you liars
To add more grief to aggravate my sorrow:
Still let me sleep, embracing clouds in vain.
And never wake to feel the day's disdain.
Samuel Daniel
Winter
When icicles hang by the wall
And Dick the Shepherd blows his nail,
And Tom bears logs into the hall,
And milk comes frozen home in pail;
When blood is nipt and ways be foul,
Then nightly sings the staring owl,
Tuwhoo! Tuwhit! Tuwhoo! a merry note!
While greasy Joan doth keel the pot.
When all aloud the wind doth blow,
And coughing drowns the parson's saw,
And birds sit brooding in the snow,
And Marian's nose looks red and raw;
When roasted crabs hiss in the bowl
Then nightly sings the staring owl
Tuwhoo! Tuwhit! Tuwhoo! A merry note!
While greasy Joan doth keel the pot.
William Shakespeare
Dirge
Come away, Come away, Death,
And in sad cypress let me be laid;
Fly away, Fly away, breath;
I am slain by a fair cruel maid.
My shroud of white stuck all with you.
O prepare it! O prepare it!
My part of death, no one so true
Did share it. Did share it.
Not a flower, not a flower sweet
On my black coffin let there be strown;
Not a friend, not a friend greet
My poor corpse, where my bones shall be
thrown:
Lay me, O where
Sad true lover never find my grave,
To weep there.
William Shakespeare
Diaphenia
Diaphenia, like the daffa-down-dilly,
White as the sun, fair as the lily,
Heigh ho, how I do love thee!
I do love thee as my lambs
Are beloved of their dams;
How blest were I if thou would'st prove
me.
Diaphenia, like the spreading roses,
That in thy sweets all sweets encloses,
Fair sweet, how I do love thee!
I do love thee as each flower
Loves the sun's life-giving power;
For dead, thy breath to life might move
me.
Diaphenia like to all things blessed
When all thy praises are expressed
Dear joy, how I do love thee!
As the birds do love the spring,
Or the bees their careful king:
Then in requite, sweet virgin, love me!
Henry Constable
Hymn
Queen and Huntress, chaste and fair,
Now the sun is laid to sleep,
Seated in thy silver chair
State in wonted manner keep:
Hesperus entreats thy light, thy light,
Goddess excellently bright.
Earth, let not they envious shade
Dare itself to interpose:
Cynthia's shining orb was made
Heaven to clear when day did close:
Bless us then with wished sight
Goddess, Goddess excellently bright.
Lay thy bow of pearl apart
And thy crystal-shining quiver;
Give unto the flying hart
Space to Breathe, how short so ever:
Thou that mak'st a day of night,
Goddess, Goddess excellently bright!
Ben Jonson
The Shepherd
How sweet is the Shepherd's sweet lot!
From the morn to the evening he strays;
He shall follow his sheep all the day
And his tongue shall be filled with praise.
For he hears the lambs innocent call,
And he hears the ewes tender reply.
He is watchful when they are in peace,
For they know when their Shepherd is nigh.
William Blake
Arnold Cooke
Three Songs of Innocence
Piping Down the Valleys Wild
Piping down the valleys wild
Piping songs of pleasant glee,
On a cloud I saw a child,
And he laughing said to me:
'Pipe a song about a Lamb!'
So I piped with merry cheer.
'Piper, pipe that song again'
So I piped: he wept to hear.
'Drop thy pipe, thy happy pipe,
Sing thy songs of happy cheer'
So I sang the same again
While he wept with joy to hear.
'Piper, sit thee down and write
In a book that all may read'
So he vanished from my sight
And I plucked a hollow reed,
And I made a rural pen
And I stained the water clear
And I wrote my happy songs,
Every child may joy to hear.
William Blake
The Echoing Green
The sun does arise
And make happy the skies,
The merry bells ring
To welcome the Spring:
The skylark and thrush
The birds of the bush
Sing louder around
To the bells' cheerful sound
While our sports shall be seen
On the Echoing Green.
Old John with white hair
Does Laugh away care
Sitting under the oak
Among the old folk.
They laugh at our play,
And soon they all say:
Such, such were the joys
When we all girls and boys
In our youth-time were seen
On the Echoing Green.
Till the little ones weary
No more can be merry,
The sun does descend,
And our sports have an end:
Round the laps of their mothers
Many sisters and brothers,
Like birds in their nest
Are ready for rest:
And sport no more seen
On the darkening Green.
William Blake
Dominick Argento
Songs About Spring
I
who knows if the moon's 1
a balloon, coming out of a keen city
in the sky filled with pretty people?
(and if you and i should
get into it, if they
should take me and take you into their
balloon,
why then
we'd go up higher with all the pretty people
than houses and steeples and clouds:
go sailing
away and away sailing into a keen
city which nobody's ever visited, where
always,
it's
Spring) and everyone's
in love and flowers pick themselves
e.e. cummings
II
Spring is like perhaps hand
(which comes carefully
out of Nowhere) arranging
a window, into which people look (while
people stare
arranging and changing placing
carefully there a strange
thing and a known thing here) and
changing everything carefully
spring is like a perhaps
Hand in a window
(carefully to
and fro moving New and
Old things, while
people stare carefully
moving a perhaps
fraction of flower here placing
an inch of air there) and
without breaking anything.
e.e. cummings
III
in Just-
springwhen the world is mud —
luscious the little
lame balloonman
whistlesfarand wee
and eddieandbill come
running from marbles and
piracies and it's spring
when the world is puddle-wonderful
the queer
old balloonman whistles
farandwee
and bettyandisbel come dancing
from hopscotch and jump rope and
it's
spring
and
the
goat-footed
balloonManwhistles
far
and
wee
e.e. cummings
IV
in
Spring comes (no-
one
asks his name)
a mender
of things
with eager
fingers (with patient
eyes) re
-new-
ing remaking what
other
-wise we should
have
thrown a-
way (and whose
brook
-bright flower-
soft bird
-quick voice loves
children
and sunlight and
mountains) in april (but
if he should
Smile) comes
nobody'll know
e.e. cummings
V
When faces called flowers float out of the ground
and breathing is wishing and wishing is having
but keeping is downward and doubting and
never
it's april (yes, april; my darling) it's spring!
yes the pretty birds frolic as spry as can fly
yes the little fish gambol as glad as can be
(yes the mountains are dancing together)
when every leaf opens without any sound
and wishing is having and having is giving
but keeping is doting and nothing and
nonsense
alive; we're alive, dear: its (kiss me now)
spring!
now the pretty birds hover so she and so he
now the little fish quiver so you and so i
(now the mountains are dancing, the
mountains)
when more than was lost has been found has
been found
and having is giving and giving is living
but keeping is darkness and winter and
cringing
it's spring (all our night becomes day) o, it's
spring!
all the pretty birds dive to the heart of the sky
all the little fish climb through the mind of the
sea
(all the mountains are dancing; are dancing)
e.e. cummings
Arnold Cooke
Nocturnes
The Moon
And like a dying lady, lean and pale
Who totters forth, wrapped in a gauzy veil,
Out of her chamber, led by the insane
And feeble wanderings of her fading brain,
The moon arose up in the murky East
A white and shapeless mass.
Art thou pale for weariness
Of climbing heaven and gazing on the earth,
Wandering companionless
Among the stars that have a different birth
And ever changing, like a joyless eye
That finds no object worth its constancy?
Percy Bysshe Shelley
Returning, We Hear The Larks
Sombre the night is.
And though we have our lives, we know
What sinister threat lurks there.
Dragging these anguished limbs, we only know
This poison-blasted track opens on our camp
On a little safe sleep.
But hark! joy joy strange joy.
Lo! heights of night ringing with unseen larks.
Music showering on our upturned list'ning faces.
Death could drop from the dark
As easily as song
But song only dropped,
Like a blind man's dreams on the sand
By dangerous tides,
Like a girl's dark hair for she dreams no
ruin lies there,
Or her kisses where a serpent hides.
Isaac Rosenberg
River Roses
By the Isar, in the twilight
We were wandering and singing,
By the Isar, in the evening
We climbed the huntsman's ladder and sat swinging
In the fir-tree overlooking the marshes,
While river met with river, and the ringing
Of their pale-green glacier water filled the evening.
By the Isar, in the twilight
We found the dark wild roses
Hanging red at the river; and simmering
Frogs were singing, and over the river closes
Was savour of ice and of roses; and glimmering
Fear was abroad We whispered: "No one
knows us.
Let it be as the snake disposes
Here in the simmering marsh."
D.H. Lawrence
The Owl
When cats run home and light is come,
And dew is cold upon the ground,
And the far-off stream is dumb,
And the whirring sail goes round,
And the whirring sail goes round;
Alone and warming his five wits,
The white owl in the belfry sits.
When merry milkmaids click the latch,
And rarely smells the new-mown hay,
And the cock has sung beneath the thatch
Twice or thrice, twice or thrice,
Twice or thrice his roundelay,
Alone and warming his five wits,
The white owl in the belfry sits.
Alfred Lord Tennyson
The Boat Song
The boat is chafing at our long delay,
And we must leave too soon.
The spicy sea-pinks
And the inborne spray,
The tawny sands, the moon.
Keep us, O Thetis, on our western flight,
Watch from thy pearly throne
Our vessel plunging
Deeper into night,
To reach a land unknown.
John Davidson
William Moylan
For a Sleeping Child Lullabies and Midnight Musings
Wynken, Blynken and Nod
Wynken, Blynken, and Nod one night
Sailed off in a wooden shoe
Sailed on a river of crystal light
Into a sea of dew.
"Where are you going, and what do you wish?"
The old moon asked the three.
"We have come to fish for the herring fish
That live in this beautiful sea;
Nets of silver and gold have we!"
Said Wynken,
Blynken,
and Nod.
The old moon laughed and sang a song
As they rocked in the wooden shoe,
And the wind that sped them all night long
Ruffled the waves of dew.
The little stars were the herring fish
That lived in that beautiful sea
"Now cast your nets wherever you wish
Never afeard are "we";
So cried the stars to the fishermen three:
Wynken
Blynken,
and Nod.
All night long their nets they threw
To the stars in the twinkling foam
Then down from the skies came the wooden shoe,
Bringing the fishermen home;
"twas all so pretty a sail it seemed
As if it could not be
And some folks thought 'twas a dream
they'd dreamed
Of sailing that beautiful sea
But I shall name you the fishermen three:
Wynken
Blynken
And Nod.
Wynken and Blynken are two little eyes,
And Nod is a little head,
And the wooden shoe that sailed the skies
Is the wee one's trundle-bed.
So shut your eyes while mother sings
Of wonderful sights that be,
And you shall see the beautiful things
As you rock in the misty sea,
Where the old shoe rocked the fishermen three,
Wynken,
Blynken
And Nod.
Eugene Field
All The Pretty Little Horses
Hushaby,
Don't you cry,
Go to sleepy, little baby,
When you wake,
You shall have
All the pretty little horses
Blacks and bays,
Dapples and grays
Coach and six-a little horses
Hushaby,
Don't you cry,
Go to sleepy, little baby.
Anonymous
The Mother's Song
It is so still in the house.
There is a calm in the house;
The snowstorm wails out there,
And the dogs are rolled up with snouts under the tail.
My little boy is sleeping on the ledge,
On his back he lies, breathing through open mouth
His little stomach is bulging round
Is it strange if I start to cry with joy?
Inuit (Arctic)
Sometime
Last night, my darling as you slept,
I thought I heard you sigh,
And to your little crib I crept,
And watched a space thereby;
Then, bending down, I kissed your brow
For, oh! I love you so
You are too young to know it now,
But some time you shall know.
Some time, when, in a darkened place
Where others come to weep,
Your eyes shall see a weary face,
Calm in eternal sleep;
The speechless lips, the wrinkled brow,
The patient smile may show
You are too young to know it now
But some time you shall know.
Look backward, then, into the years,
And see me here to-night
See, O my darling! how my tears
Are falling as I write;
And feel once more upon your brow
The kiss of long ago
You are too young to know it now,
But some time you shall know.
Eugene Field
Songs of Innocence · Jean Danton, soprano
Dominick Argento
Six Elizabethan Songs
Spring (1:45)
Sleep (3:15)
Winter (1:47)
Dirge (3:40)
Diaphenia (2:14)
Hymn (3:46)
Arnold Cooke
Three Songs of Innocence
Piping Down the Valleys Wild (2:09)
The Shepherd (2:15)
The Echoing Green (2:32)
Dominick Argento
Songs About Spring
who knows if the moon's a balloon? (2:14)
spring is like a perhaps hand (2:42)
in Just spring (1:50)
in Spring comes (1:53)
when faces called flowers float out of the ground (2:26)
Arnold Cooke
Nocturnes
The Moon (2:45)
Returning, We Hear the Larks (2:29)
River Roses (3:01)
The Owl (1:06)
Boat Song (2:23)
William Moylan
For A Sleeping Child
Lullabies & Midnight Musings
Wynken, Blynken and Nod (7:37)
All the Pretty Little Horses (2:26)
The Mother's Song (2:58)
Some Time (4:19)
Produced by William Moylan · Engineered by James Donahue
Mastered by James Donahue and William Moylan
Final Preparation by Laurie Flannery, Northeastern Digital Recording
C. Thomas Brooks, conductor,
Six Elizabethan Songs
Thomas Stumpf, piano & harpsichord
David Martins, clarinet
Ellen Michaud-Martins, horn
Christopher Krueger, flute
Jane Harrison, oboe
Anne Black, violin
John Bumstead, cello
Total Time = 65:18
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