Death By Drowning (2024)
Duration: 15:00 minutes
Instrumentation: low voice and piano
Premiere: February 5, 2025 by Daveda Karanas, mezzo-soprano, and Michael Ippolito, piano, at Texas State University.
Notes:
Death by Drowning is a setting of texts by Carl Sandburg, Stephen Crane, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Langston Hughes, and Virginia Woolf. While all very different in outlook, each writer gave voice to a deep sense of longing for the sea, and for death.
There is something about the limitless expanse of the sea that is enthralling to the mind. All encompassing, too vast to comprehend, the water pulls at the mind the way the moon pulls at the tides. This longing for the sea suspends us between land and sea, between known and unknown, and between safety and danger.
Death by Drowning begins with Carl Sandburg’s “From the Shore,” as the poet’s imagination is suspended over the open ocean from the perspective of a “lone gray bird.” The ocean is immense and dangerous, but in this song it is viewed from a distance. Stephen Crane’s “The King of the Seas” personifies the deadly sea, who has been watching a weeping woman from afar. In Crane’s imagination, the sea is not a cruel destroyer, but a helpless old man at the mercy of “bustling Fates” who “heap his hands with corpses.” Death and danger are close enough to touch in Edna St. Vincent Millay’s “Low-Tide” as it describes the in-between time when the sea floor is temporarily accessible before being submerged again, “no place to dream but a place to die.” Langston Hughes “Sea Calm” is a moment of eerie stillness and foreboding before Millay’s “Inland” brings the cycle to a frantic crisis. In the end, the longing for the sea becomes a longing for death. The last text, an excerpt from Virginia Woolf’s The Waves, is a sort of epilogue. No longer suspended between land and sea, slowly sinking into oblivion: “everything falls in a tremendous shower, dissolving me.”
