I consider myself fortunate to have spent most of my adult life as a resident of the beautiful west coast city of Vancouver, British Columbia; but I was born three thousand miles from there, on Canada’s east coast. A proud Nova Scotian at heart, I have done a fair amount of research over the years into my family roots there, which go back to the 1760’s. So it was very gratifying when, in 2008, a very fine choir from my home province, the Halifax Camerata Singers, commissioned a piece from me for their annual Remembrance Day concert. And while the text I chose to set was by the great American poet, Walt Whitman, I wanted to give my setting a flavour of Nova Scotia in some way… 

As it happened, I knew a bit about what people were singing in Nova Scotia’s churches, meeting-halls, and parlours around the time that Walt Whitman was writing "The Last Invocation." A journal kept by my great-great-grandfather, Capt. William B. Smith, in the year 1863, indicates that he was familiar with what was then a very popular collection of sacred and secular music called The American Vocalist (Boston: Thompson, Brown, and Company, 1849). So popular, in fact, was this publication in Nova Scotia, that copies of the oblong, green-covered volume were still to be found in second-hand bookshops around the province as late as the 1980’s. I acquired a copy from one such shop myself about that time, and over the ensuing years I made a considerable study of its contents.

Among many haunting old tunes of uncertain origin included in The American Vocalist is one called "Gloom Of Autumn." It is given (on page 285) as the setting for a long, pious, and very morose text about the brevity of earthly life (a text that my great-great-grandfather would almost certainly have known, in the shorter and altered form in which it appeared in the ceremony for admitting a new candidate to the Freemasons—he being a Worshipful Master of that brotherhood). 

As I thought about the Remembrance Day (Nov. 11th) premiere my commission would be receiving, I decided that the tune "Gloom Of Autumn" would be a suitable—and suitably-named!—Nova Scotian element to incorporate into my setting of Whitman’s text. 

Accordingly, my next compositional decision was to include a part for some sort of obbligato treble instrument that could be the "voice" of the old hymn tune, and perhaps add some other elements of interest. I soon realized that, given the somewhat abrupt beginning of Whitman’s poem, the solo instrument could also provide a much-needed introduction, and set the mood for the choir’s first words.

The introduction was not, of course, the first music I composed—since one cannot introduce what comes later until one has written what comes later! But as simple as this introduction is, it was fashioned quite carefully, using only the intervals of seconds and thirds, and from just two melodic elements: namely, the first four notes of the hymn melody (in a freer, elongated rhythm), and a little figure of four eighth-notes, taken directly from the middle phrases of the hymn, that circles around, and comes to rest on, an F (which, interestingly, is the pitch on which the hymn itself ends--despite having every appearance of being in C minor!).

By the time the introduction reaches its cadence—before the choir has even uttered a sound—the listener will have heard all the pitch material for the entire piece. The music that unfolds over the next four minutes contains no accidentals, no modulations, and no secondary harmonies—only the seven pitches of the C natural-minor scale. This extreme musical simplicity is intended to help convey the sense of calm assurance that the poem is seeking to assert over the whole fraught and difficult business of "shuffling off this mortal coil"!

But, as the references to a "fortress’d house" and "knitted locks"—and even moreso, the sudden apostrophes to Flesh and Love at the end of the poem—make clear, Whitman is torn about exchanging his physical body for he-knows-not-what. While he may express a wish to "glide noiselessly forth," the poem suggests an underlying struggle; and the music "goes there" too—in the increasing tension of the sixteenth-notes in the obbligato, and also in the growing intensity and dissonance of certain pivotal chords in the choral part. I refer to the chords in bars 40-41 (on the words "noiselessly forth"), bar 58 ("doors"), and bar 65 ("love"). Each of these chords uses six of the seven available pitches in this key, but each omits a different pitch. The first chord omits the pitch D, and so contains only one semitone dissonance; the second omits the F, so it has two semitone dissonances, which are theoretically spaced apart from one another; the third chord omits the B-flat, and therefore contains two semitone dissonances and no theoretical gaps between any of the pitches. With the added elements of tessitura, voicing, and dynamics, these three chords constitute a progression from the misty, veiled effect of the first, through a more meaty, fuller-sounding second, to the full-throated exclamation of the third.

Meanwhile, the obbligato instrument’s role, after the introduction, is first to play a verse of "Gloom Of Autumn" as the choir sings lines 2 to 5 of the poem. (The through-line of the hymn tune helps to meld together the texture of the choral parts, which inevitably share a certain fragmentary quality with the poem itself.) As the choir proceeds to the second stanza of the poem, the obbligato begins an improvisatory countermelody which incorporates an ever-increasing flow of sixteenth-notes. As the choir reaches the poem’s final lines, the accompanying sixteenth-notes increase in intensity, and at the word "love," they propel the obbligato into a higher octave, and there it begins to play another verse of "Gloom Of Autumn." At this point the singers briefly partake in the instrumental aspect of the piece, joining in on the hymn melody in an imitative cascade. As the middle phrases of the hymn tune are played, the choir recalls a moment from earlier in the piece; and as the last note of the hymn dies away, the choir repeats the fervent hope that we may be wafted from this life into the next, "at the last, tenderly."

(Incidentally, when I was finalizing the score to submit it to the Camerata Singers’ conductor, Jeff Joudrey, I decided to limit the options for the obbligato to flute or violin. At the premiere, the obbligato was played by violinist Jennifer Jones, who also recorded the work with the choir for a commercially-released CD a few years later. Having heard the rich intensity she brings to the part on that recording, I can now hardly imagine it played by anything other than a violin—ideally Jennifer Jones’s!)

-- Stephen Smith (September, 2020)