Music and Texts of GARY BACHLUND
Vocal Music | Piano | Organ | Chamber Music | Orchestral | Articles and Commentary | Poems and Stories | Miscellany | FAQs
Companion to the Other - (2007)
Apache Wedding Prayer believed adapted by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
for medium voice and piano
Now each of you will feel no rain,
For each of you will be shelter to the other.
Now each of you will feel no cold,
For each of you will be warmth to the other.
Now there is no more loneliness,
For each of you will be companion to the other.
Now you are two bodies,
But there is only one life before you.
Go now to your dwelling place
To enter into the days of your togetherness
And may your days be good and long upon the earth.[ 3 pages, circa 2' 40" ]
Several web sites suggest these adaptations are perhaps by American poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, although they do not appear in the definitive 1886 Riverside Edition of his Complete Works. Whether the English adaptation is authentic or not, I further repeated the phrase "each of you" to stress the "charge" which is given in a wedding ceremony, meant to be binding on the individual within the context of the mutual relationship.
With a tessitura of a minor ninth, this setting of the text relies on two simple harmonic successions, in the sense that Schoenberg uses the word. The first relies on the common tonic between B and G major, then altered to G minor and thereafter returning to the tonic, B major, the B flat functioning also a the A sharp leading tone. The second is a simple alternation between the tonic B major and the mediant D sharp minor.
The second is a simple alternation between the tonic B major and the mediant D sharp minor.
The two harmonic successions make up the the couplets' accompaniment, with the minor variation of transposing the second harmonic succession as variation later in the setting. Throughout, it is intended that the performers find interpretive rubati as befit the text and emotional content therein.
The score for Companion to the Other is available as a free PDF download, though any major commercial performance or recording of the work is prohibited without prior arrangement with the composer. Click on the graphic below for this piano-vocal score.
