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"Elfin Song (1910)" by George Whitefield Chadwick

1910

Chadwick dedicated Elfin Song (1910) to S. L. Herrman and the Treble Clef Club. The text choice reflects Chadwick's light, humorous side. He sets an excerpt from Joseph Rodman Drake's The Culprit Fay (1836), with references to "ouphe and goblin, imp and sprite." The work's piano reduction of the original orchestral scoring contains some rapid figuration at an Allegretto vivace tempo.

After a wild fairy dance round the witch hazel tree, the appearance of a beetle causes a key change and a buzzing, 16th-note figure in the accompaniment. Next, the leaf harp sings accompanied by rapid arpeggios. The opening music returns and the fairy figures "skip and gambol merrily" to a pp conclusion.

Related Resources

• Elfin song
• Elfin song

"Enchantment, op. 17, no. 1, (1908)" by Mabel Wheeler Daniels

1908

Daniels's Enchantment, op. 17, no. 1, (1908) uses a text in praise of summer by Isabel Ecclestone Mackay (1875-1928). Daniels scores the piece for SATB [soprano, alto, tenor, bass]. She sets the mood in the opening tempo marking--"Allegro brilliant, with spirit." In a triple meter, one in a bar, the voices begin with a hemiola figure that returns as a motto several times, "O Summer!" Daniels introduces one of her signature harmonic surprises at "Spring is just behind us dying," marked meno mosso, dolce. Sheprogresses from a C-major chord through a C-dominant-seventh chord to an A-flat-major chord. Equally surprising is the movement from A-flat to G major for the following text, " Autumn just before and flying are the days." More poignant harmonies in long note values depict the poetry "Crimson, gold, and purple shading slowly into night, . . . Day and dark exchange soft greeting." A final vivace section reintroduces the hemiola figure, moving into a frantic molto animato ending.

Daniels's compositional career gained major status in 1913, when she presented her choral/orchestral work The Desolate City, op. 21,at the MacDowell Colony in New Hampshire. Following that success, she returned to the MacDowell as a fellow for twenty-four successive summers. The wooded setting inspired one of her most widely played orchestral compositions, Deep Forest, op. 34, no. 1,(1932-33), which was the only piece by a woman composer performed at a 1939 Carnegie Hall concert of new American music. The work marked a shift from her Germanic style toward a more impressionistic musical vocabulary. Daniels wrote her best-known work, Exultate Deo (1929),to celebrate Radcliffe's fiftieth anniversary and A Psalm of Praise (1954) for the college's seventy-fifth anniversary. Her Song of Jael, premiered at the 1940 Worcester Festival, marked her first venture into a modern musical idiom, using daring dissonances and highly original choral effects.

Related Resources

• Enchantment : op. 17, no. 1