A Dream Within a Dream

I was inspired to write this piece by being interested in the Romantic and Victorian eras of literature, especially Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë.  I had just finished the somewhat disturbing book when I sat down to write this piece, and in searching through poems by the Brontë sisters and their contemporaries, I found Edgar Allan Poe’s A Dream within a Dream which captured the gothic, isolating darkness of those times.  I was inspired to use Romantic style harmony, the musical language that was popular at the time of these literary eras.  Some moments may evoke the motets of Mendelssohn or Brahms, though with some dissonant departures or use of more modern choral textures.  An especially demented chord occurs on the word “creep,” followed by an unnerving melody that traverses the parts on “through my fingers through the deep.”  The passage emerges in E major, leading the listener to expect a transition to a new key center, but instead the next phrase falls right back into the original world of C minor, illustrating the cyclical nature of torment or grief, and a feeling of being trapped in one’s own emotional state.  The cyclical feeling is also displayed in the elision of the phrase “dream within a dream,” in which one part starts their first dream precisely when the other part finishes, and in doing so they spiral around each other in chromatic harmony over a G pedal point.  The piece ends on a D major chord, outside of the key center of C minor, which suggests a feeling of being finished, yet unsettled.

It was premiered (performance listed above) by the University of Northern Colorado conducted by Nick Newman, who asked me to write the piece for the choir.