Product Description:
PDF score of If I Must Go
Please note: 10 copy minimum. Please purchase one copy per member of your choir.
Please note: 10 copy minimum. Please purchase one copy per member of your choir.
Program Note:
Sara Teasdale’s poignant work If I Must Go speaks to love, loss, and letting go with anguish, passion, and hope as the speaker works through their grief. In my musical setting of this text, I picture the narrator thinking out loud as they traverse their tumultuous thoughts, not always knowing what to say next. But as soon as they stumble upon the way forward, they dive back into the moment with vigor. Just as processing grief is rarely linear, so does the text repeat, fragment, and wrap around itself as the counterpoint attempts to work through each line, wringing as much meaning as possible out of every word – as if not wanting to finish each phrase, because it requires letting it go. Despite the continued confusion and charged emotion, the narrator finally finds peace in the unresolved as the choir ends on a unison, repeating the first line of the poem one last time.
Instrumentation:
SSATB/SSAA unaccompanied choir
Recording:
|
|
|
Score:
Text:
If I Must Go
If I must go to heaven's end
Climbing the ages like a stair,
Be near me and forever bend
With the same eyes above me there;
Time will fly past us like leaves flying,
We shall not heed, for we shall be
Beyond living, beyond dying,
Knowing and known unchangeably.
- Sara Teasdale, Flame and Shadow (1920)
If I must go to heaven's end
Climbing the ages like a stair,
Be near me and forever bend
With the same eyes above me there;
Time will fly past us like leaves flying,
We shall not heed, for we shall be
Beyond living, beyond dying,
Knowing and known unchangeably.
- Sara Teasdale, Flame and Shadow (1920)