Part Song for a cappella SSAATTBB Choir, with Soloists (text from “A Parting”, by John Leicester Warren, Third Baron de Tabley, in "Orpheus in Thrace and Other Poems", 1901) (first composition sketches 2005; completed March 2016)

Marked at the head of the score, “Bittersweet and With Dignity (yet always expressive)”, this work is dedicated to the memory of the artist, John William Godward (1861-1922) – whose work was largely overlooked during his lifetime – yet who ploughed on regardless, despite being ostracised by his own family in the pursuit of his art, and its technical perfection. Radically changing tastes and the aftermath of the First World War led him to feel that the possibility of realising an artistic golden age had vanished, ultimately leading him to take his own life. Upon reaching the culmination of many years of work, and at the height of his powers, Godward’s art had become “old-fashioned”, and seemingly worthless overnight, yet he was never truly recognised for the brilliance of his images even when he was creating them (a situation only rectified several decades later). Godward’s fate is perhaps representative of the condition of many hardworking and talented solitary artists, especially those lacking early advantage; and so the score of “Wasted and Worn” also includes this head-quotation from Elegy Written in a Country Church-Yard (1751) by Thomas Gray (1716-71):

“Along the cool sequester’d vale of life / They kept the noiseless tenour of their way.”

Wasted and worn that passion must expire,
Which swept at sunrise like a sudden fire
Across the whitened crest of happy waves.
Now lonely in a labyrinth of graves,
His footsteps foiled, his spirit bound and numb,
Grey Love sits dumb.

First recorded 22nd April 2016 in the First United Methodist Church, Hamilton, Ohio, USA, by the Stanbery Singers, directed by Paul John Stanbery.

[Part of a large-scale, contemporary, "Polychoral Music Composition and Recording Project"]

ISMN PENDING. ASCAP/MCPS Registered.