Sunset Symphony
Divisi - Sheet Music

SATB choir (divisi) unaccompanied - Advanced

SKU: EC.8934

Composed by Joshua Fishbein. E.C. Schirmer Publishing #8934. Published by E.C. Schirmer Publishing (EC.8934).

UPC: 600313489341. English.

The poem “Sunset Symphony” by Texas-based author Nathan Brown provides a wealth of musical inspiration, which I eagerly tapped into for my choral setting. Without words, the beginning of Brown’s poem consists of a series of ellipses that I set in an almost pointillistic manner, with pulsating neutral syllables. They loosely form a musical shape that parallels the contour depicted in the poem. Those familiar with my choral composition A Prep-School Boy know that I am fond of musical puns. Brown’s pun “tuning up to middle sea” was especially fun to set, not once but twice, as voices converge upon middle C. In another notable moment of text painting, the altos, tenors, and basses sing in soft homophony “and the sun is dimming the lights,” while the sopranos flicker away into the distance, like a flame burning out. Also, as in many of my other works, this composition contains my favorite musical device —imitative counterpoint. In canon, the altos and basses begin the last stanza of text imitatively with a rising and falling ostinato, while the sopranos and tenors sing in duet “the curtain raises and gilded rays shoot across the sky.” After these pairs of voices take turns switching roles, the basses and tenors strongly declare in unison “a path of golden light leaps across the water,” imitated immediately by the sopranos. The piece grows in intensity with high and low voices echoing antiphonally “as sand and surf roar with applause” until the halves of the choir unite at a dynamic high point on “applause.” The piece ends as it begins, tapering away with a truncated recollection of the wordless pulsations from the opening. It is my hope that the listener will hear the shape that the poet had in mind. —Joshua Fishbein.