Consolations: The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words. A musical meditation on the writings of David Whyte

Rhapsody

Andre Waignein (1941-2015)

ii. Andante

BEAUTY: “Beauty especially occurs in the meeting of time with the timeless; the passing moment framed by what has happened and what is about to occur….Beauty is the harvest of presence.”

Caprice: Hommage a Charlie Chaplin

Jean Charles Richard (b. 1974)

NOSTALGIA: “Nostalgia is the arriving waveform of a dynamic past, newly remembered and about to be re-imagined by a mind and a body at last ready to come to terms with what actually occurred. Nostalgia subverts the present by its overwhelming physical connection to a person or a place, to a time in which we lived or to a person with whom we lived, making us wonder, in the meeting of past and present, if the intervening years ever occurred. Nostalgia can feel like an indulgence, a sickness, an inundation by forces beyond us, but strangely, forces that have also lived with us and within us, all along.”

Lilac Tears (2020)

Jennifer Jolley (b. 1981)

DESPAIR: “Despair takes us in when we have nowhere else to go; when we feel the heart cannot break anymore, when our world or our loved ones disappear…when our body is carrying profound pain in a way that does not seem to go away. To disappear through despair, is to seek a temporary but necessary illusion, a place where we hope nothing can ever find us in the same way again.” 

“We take the first steps out of despair by taking on its full weight and coming fully to ground in our wish not to be the here. We let our bodies and we let our world breathe again.”

Tableaux De Provence

ii. Chanson pour ma mao

Paule Maurice (1910-1967)

LONGING: “Longing is divine discontent, the unendurable present finding a physical doorway to awe and discovery that frightens and emboldens, humiliates and beckons, makes us into pilgrim souls and sets us on some road that starts in the center of the body”

Pulse (2015)

Vincent David (b. 1974)

AMBITION: “No matter the self-conceited importance of our labors we are all compost for worlds we cannot yet imagine. Ambition takes us toward that horizon, but not over it - that line will always recede before our controlling hands. But a calling is a conversation between our physical bodies, our work, our intellects and imaginations, and a new world that is itself the territory we seek.”

Solace: A Lyric Concerto

Joel Love (b. 1982)

Just before I began composing Solace, I had a great set of conversations with the leader of its consortium-commission, Connie Frigo. During our discussions, we talked about how well the saxophone can imitate vocal music and both expressed interest in a new concerto with a significant lyrical element. Early on, she suggested I read David Whyte’s Consolations: The Solace, Nourishment, and Underlying Meaning in Words. Whyte’s work meditates on words themselves, illustrating their deeper meaning, often revealing connections between difficult situations and their unexpectedly positive outcomes. Similarly, each movement meditates on a mood and is inspired by either a selection of text or title word from five consolations, picked by either Connie or me. Throughout the concerto, I challenge the soloist to play lyrically in extreme registers (called the “altissimo” register, which is above the typical, written range of the instrument) and while playing virtuosic passages in five unique sound worlds. 

Whyte describes joy as the “the sheer intoxicating beauty of the world inhabited as an edge between what we previously thought was us and what we thought was other than us,”[1] which is where “Joy” takes its inspiration. This movement highlights the soloist’s ability to play difficult syncopations, made even more challenging by their dissonance with the accented beats in mixed, irregular meters.

In “Besieged,” the music expresses a darker sentiment. Whyte’s poem states that “Conscious or unconscious, we are surrounded not only by the vicissitudes of a difficult world but even more by those of our own making.” The saxophone is often pitted against or is competing back-and-forth with the wind ensemble, striving and fighting to overcome. The piece ends just after the climax and segues into the third movement, echoing Whyte’s sentiment that we must sometimes go through difficult challenges to be aware and grateful of what we have.

The third movement is the heart of the concerto. Whyte states that “Gratitude is not necessarily something that is shown after the event, it is the deep, a priori state of attention that shows we understand and are equal to the gifted nature of life.” In “Gratitude,” my goal was to create the most beautiful and lyrical music I could to showcase the gorgeous vocal-like sounds of which the saxophone is capable.

I would have been remiss to neglect any noir or jazz-influenced sounds, as the saxophone is oft-associated with the sounds of jazz and blues. “Hiding” is a scherzo that explores the jazz/funk idiom. Whyte states that Hiding is “creative, necessary and beautifully subversive of outside interference and control…Hiding is the radical independence necessary for our emergence into the light of a proper human future.” This movement is all about groove and its manipulation and the saxophonist, at times, gains a bit of “independence.”

Finally, “Work” is a perpetual-motion technical showpiece. The movement is written in rondo form, which means the “A” part from the beginning returns several times. With every new section, the soloist is presented with a slightly different technical challenge. The inspirational text summates my feeling of writing this concerto and what I imagine the soloist feels as they accomplish this “Work”: “Work among all its abstracts, is actually intimacy, the place where the self meets the world…We make what we make, we give a gift, not only through what we make or do, but in the way we feel as we do, and even, in the way others witness us in our feeling and doing, giving to them as they give to us…”

-Joel Love