COMPOSER'S NOTES
The six choruses collected here were begun as separate a cappella works. “All Along the Valley” was published in this form in 1959, and the rest in 1982 and 1983. Accompaniments were an afterthought, evolving bit by bit from discreet pitch cues to full melodic partners with lives of their own. In source and spirit, all six are campfire songs. So it shouldn’t seem surprising that all the poems are resonant of nature, and that they were chosen from an age when “natural philosophy” and melancholy were the special genius of English verse.
We Northerners are not so long accustomed to cities as our Mediterranean cousins. In the end we would rather trust the forests and mountains, the sea and stars. And it was never more so when Victorians made a gallant stand against the skepticism inherent in their own science. The two generations that separate our poets are proof of the persistence and compass of the vision that unites them.