Devolving Songs

Devolving Songs (for large ensemble, soprano, mezzo-soprano, and instrumental trio) consists of eight settings of Wallace Stevens’ “From the Misery of Don Joost,” a poem from the point of view of a Don Quixote-like character about the difficulty of change, the dissonance between bodily and intellectual knowledge, and the haunting echoes of a violent life.

Song I, the “primary” setting, uses the text in its entirety; the music is ferocious, violent, fragmented.

In songs II-VI, the text dissolves while the musical material transforms into a timbral shadow of the original.

In settings VI-VIII, a new language, both musical and textual, arises from the debris left over by the process of devolution.

The beauty of Devolving Songs is multifaceted, encompassing the deconstructive justice of dismantling violence into restfulness; the creative joy of building a language, piece by piece; the primal glee of watching a sandcastle inexorably washed away into the ocean to become part of the waves.

Devolving Songs lasts approximately 30 minutes. It represents the culmination of my doctoral work at McGill, where it served as my doctoral thesis.

Songs I, III, V and VI were performed by the McGill Contemporary Music Ensemble on February 29, 2024. Click here to listen.

I have finished my combat with the sun;
And my body, the old animal,
Knows nothing more.

The powerful seasons bred and killed,
And were themselves the genii
Of their own ends.

Oh, but the very self of the storm
Of sun and slaves, breeding and death,
The old animal—

The senses and feeling, the very sound
And sight, and all there was of the storm—
Knows nothing more.

-Wallace Stevens, From the Misery of Don Joost