Instrumentation: Flute Quartet (speaking and singing)
Duration: ca. 7:30
Program Note:
Quiver and Quench was written for an outdoor performance of the Duende Flute Quartet at Edisto Beach State Park in South Carolina. The work explores the relationship between the ocean, the creatures that inhabit the waters & shores, and the role that these marine ecosystems play in the lives of human beings.
The work sets three texts, the first being an excerpt from Psalm 104:25-26. This passage is a remarkable ancient Hebrew meditation on the activity teeming within and upon the surface of the ocean. The text is spoken and sung in the Latin Vulgate.
The second and third texts are by H.D. (Hilda Doolittle), an early 20th century American Imagist poet. Sea Iris holds a magnifying glass up to the simultaneously fragile and tenacious flowers that populate the shore. These sun-drenched, sand-grit perspectives reflect back the powerful generative and destructive forces of the ocean and the points at which lumbering human activity brushes against these much smaller members of the marine ecosystem.
Finally, the third text presents a stark and prescient image of human beings and the sea in conflict. The Wind Sleepers imagines a chorus of voices driven away by the wind and the waves, foreshadowing in 1916 a world we recognize today in the experiences of climate refugees. They cry “we are stung by the hurled sand and the broken shells. We no longer sleep in the wind – we awoke and fled through the city gate.”
In the shadow of these texts, fragmented musical quotations from a choral work – Never Weather-Beaten Sail – begin to appear. The plaintive tune by C. Hubert H. Parry and text by Thomas Campion hold the promise of welcome and rest for weary sojourners: “Never weather-beaten sail more willing bent to shore. Never tired pilgrim’s limbs affected slumber more than my wearied sprite…”
Quiver and Quench attempts to hold these varying perspectives and experiences in tension, probing all the complexities evoked by the single word mare, “the sea.”
Premiere: April 24, 2022; Edisto, SC. Duende Flute Quartet.
Peter A. Underhill 