Ben Johnston: Sonnets of Desolation (1981)

Ben Johnston (*1926): Sonnets of Desolation (1981). The New Swingle Singers. 1. Carrion Comfort 0:00 2. I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day 3:03 3. Patience, hard thing! 5:10 4. That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire and of the Comfort of Resurrection 7:25 Sonnets of Desolation was written for the New Swingle Singers, who premiered the piece in November 1981 in Urbana, Illinois. Recognized world-wide as masters of the classical scat, the British octet commands a repertoire that ranges from works of the 16th century to the present day The New Swingle Singers have performed at the Kennedy Center, Wolftrap and the Village Gate, among other notable appearances. In the field of contemporary music, the group has been closely associated with Italian composer Luciano Berio, who has included them in his Opera and La Vera Storia and has directed them in recordings of A-Ronne and The Cries of London. “Sonnets of Desolation was commissioned by the Paul Fromm Foundation for the New Swingle Singers. It is a setting of four of the last sonnets of the British poet Gerard Manley Hopkins. The poems deal with spiritual crisis, with death and with faith. In composing this music I used for the first time all the overtones through the thirteenth partial, which effectively means through the sixteenth. As in the music of Harry Partch, the inverted series is used complementarily. The choral writing is in eight parts, with one on a part. Microphones are used to amplify the voices.“ (Ben Johnston) *** The music published in our channel is exclusively dedicated to divulgation purposes and not commercial. This within a program shared to study classic educational music of the 1900’s (mostly Italian) which involves thousands of people around the world. If someone, for any reason, would deem that a video appearing in this channel violates the copyright, please inform us immediately before you submit a claim to Youtube, and it will be our care to remove immediately the video accordingly. Your collaboration will be appreciated.