Opening Remarks

The genesis of this musical setting came from my friendship, begun in 1986, with the late Jamie Mackay, Glenn member and US congressman, who introduced me to the poetry of Sidney Lanier. From Jamie’s Lanier volume, I learned that Lanier wrote poetry in Sunny Side, Georgia, the home village of my ancestors. In the fall of 1996, I met Glenn members Bebe and Jack Davidson who became fast friends. Jamie became the Advisory Chair and Jack the Board chair of the non-profit organization Meridian Herald, which other friends and I formed in 1997.  Among its founding goals was my setting “The Marshes of Glynn” to music. Jack’s firm guidance has signally advanced the completion of this work.

I am also especially grateful to Sally Sears Belcher, who in 2002 took a great interest in this project and who has performed countless generosities to support my inspiration and writing, including two trips to Ossabaw Island with supportive friends. I am also grateful to Jane and Wayne Thorpe for letting me use their Montana ranch house, where this past September, I wrote the fist notes. 

I am grateful to Glenn Church for nurturing my growth as a composer over the past 21 years and to the Chancel Choir for their singular support throughout this time and for their patience and generosity in learning this challenging music. I am also grateful to the Music Committee, whose gifts in honor of my 20th year of service in 2006 helped fund my composition retreats for this work.

During these retreats I strove to encounter nature and to see and understand what Lanier saw. On Cumberland Island, while wrestling with Lanier’s Hymns of the Marshes, I had what was to me a revelation – that Lanier could feel the sentience of nature and was able to articulate what he understood.  Lanier gave voice to nature. I also perceived that it is my role as a composer to comprehend and organize – or compose – these insights into a form that is more directly comprehensible, and through the holy mystery of music, magnify and commend these to our souls.

That these great musicians would perform and that you would come to hear this composition, is a humbling honor.  Thank you.

Steven Darsey

Program Notes

Sidney Lanier (1842–81), born in Macon, Georgia, is among the South’s most important poets. His gift for seeing truth in nature combined with his professional musicianship enabled him to write verse of creative metric structure, rhapsodic beauty, and oracular insight.  With a genius in poetry akin to Mozart’s in music, Lanier wrote verse of moral strength and singing grace. 

Lanier visited Brunswick, Georgia, several times, where he explored the live oak forest to the coastal marsh. He sat under a great live oak – now famous as the Lanier Oak – and looked over the marsh toward the sea. There he gained the inspiration for his great poem “The Marshes of Glynn.” Lanier subsequently wrote three other poems: “Sunrise”; “Individuality”; and “Marsh Song- At Sunset,” which he combined with “The Marshes of Glynn” in a set he titled Hymns of the Marshes. Though he wrote “The Marshes of Glynn” first, he placed that poem last in the set. From the first, “Sunrise,” he excised lines that he published as “A Ballad of Trees and the Master,” which we sing this afternoon as a hymn.

In “The Marshes of Glynn,” Lanier takes us from the womb-like sanctuary of the forest, through the sensual threshold of the beach, to the broad marsh – identified with Christ – the sea and the world to the east, where we face freedom and challenge, but where we may through faith “fly in the greatness of God.” Finally Lanier addresses the dark mysteries of human existence and of our relation to God in his query, “But who will reveal to our waking ken the forms that swim and the shapes that creep under the waters of sleep”?

Lanier arranged the poem into 10 stanzas, each with differing numbers of lines, and lines composed of varying numbers of poetic feet.  Thus the poem has no predefined stanzaic structure, nor is there a consistent metric scheme. In his book on prosody, The Science of English Verse, Lanier cites the “classic dactyl” as a significant duple meter with a strong first beat followed by two weaker beats “in which grim regularity presides like the changeless fate in a Greek tragedy.” Lanier made important use of this and other meters in the service of beauty and meaning.

Setting this great poem to music has been a blessed challenge. To honor Lanier's sweeping vision, I choose the largest palate available to a classical musician, that of a symphony chorus and orchestra.  After completing the score in January 2008 with a skeletal orchestration, I made the reduction for piano and organ used this afternoon. The Chancel Choir and guests with Todd Skrabanek and Timothy Albrecht accompanying nobly represent the intended forces.

My goal throughout this musical setting has been to demark and convey Lanier’s meaning and to provide sounds that accord with the substance and spirit of his vision.    This required an outline of keys, voicings, and orchestration as a road map for the composition. Lanier’s ideas flow with such frequency and richness as to render their distinct musical treatment impossible. The sheer number of words in the poem – 993 – requires that the work be principally syllabic – one note per syllable.  

The work opens in the Phrygian mode with a key signature of d flat, moving to b flat minor with the first choral entrance. It concludes in the Dorian mode with a key signature of c flat. These modes and keys evoke the richness of the live oak forest, the tidal marsh, and the archetypical mysteries Lanier addresses in his poem. The opening extended instrumental prelude, intended principally for strings – (carried by organ in this version), is constructed on a broadly moving, single melody designed to represent a branch of a live oak as it grows toward the light. This melody proceeds simultaneously with three variations in canon, increasing in animation and complexity to represent the live oak forest depicted at the beginning of the poem.

The first stanza is set as a dialogue between choir and soloists. Stanza two, scored for alto and flute solos and strings, is in part an homage to Lanier’s prowess as a flute player. The prodigious stanza three is set as an extended choral chant with string, wind, and brass accompaniment. Stanza four begins with baritone and horn solos with brass accompaniment and moves to soprano and cello solos, followed by a lengthy soprano and alto duet with string accompaniment, and concluding with tenor and trumpet solos with string accompaniment. Stanza five is a bass solo with strings. Stanza six begins with a choral statement and proceeds into an extended canon-fugue, where the voices enter in strict imitation. Stanza seven is a unison anthem for all voices and full orchestra that carries the most famous and majestic words of the poem.   Making use of classic dactyl and triple meters to underscore meaning, this and the preceding fugue together form the climax of the work. Stanza eight is set as a solo quartet with string and wind accompaniment. Stanza nine is for alto solo and strings, and stanza ten is for eight-part choir and bass solo with wind and string accompaniment.

In stanza ten, “The forms that swim…” is set to a canon (round) that comprises permutations of its initial melodic phrase. This canon makes prominent use of the augmented fourth interval, tritone or “devil’s tone,” so named because of its harshness to the ear and its character of uncertainty – of not belonging. As I believe that these words form a key to Lanier’s meaning for the entire Hymns of the Marshes cycle, I composed this section first and inserted the tritone at strategic places earlier in the work.  While the canon is proceeding in the voices, the organ enters with the music which began the work, depicting the live oak forest.   Thus we have the live oak forest juxtaposed with the brooding mystery of sleep. These give way to eight-part choral music, echoing the first choral entrance, which expands to extol the marvelous marshes of Glynn. 

The fugal setting of stanza six, “Ye spread and span like the catholic man…,” brings these lines in relief from the rest of the work and intensifies Lanier’s embedded confession of Christian faith. The following unison anthem rhapsodizes the freedom won through faith. The poem, supported by the musical setting, shows the interdependency of nature, humanity, and God as we move toward the redemption of creation. 

Steven Darsey