Death - (2012) ![](images/01_Little_Green_Dot.gif)
Paul Laurence Dunbar
for medium voice and piano
Storm and strife and stress,
Lost in a wilderness,
Groping to find a way,
Forth to the haunts of day.
Sudden a vista peeps,
Out of the tangled deeps,
Only a point – the ray
But at the end is day.
Dark is the dawn and chill,
Daylight is on the hill,
Night is the flitting breath,
Day rides the hills of death.
3 pages, circa 4' 00"
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Paul Laurence Dunbar
The text is found in Dunbar's collection, Lyrics of Love and Laughter (1903). For other settings of Dunbar's poetry, click here.
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The three strophes are set as a meditation, quiet, lyric and very sustained. The harmonic scheme is quasi-polytonal, though a tonal center informs throughout. C major yields to C sharp minor and thence to its subdominant as distant from C. This is the harmonic vocabulary for the setting throughout, gentle stress placed on some seconds within the scale.
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The score for Death 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.
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Death
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