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A New Shepherd's Calendar
1991

2 sopranos
alto
2 tenors
baritone 

duration 32'

first performance:
La Fenice
1st & 2nd Church, Boston / June 12, 1991

SCORE
The Passionate Shepheard to His Love / 
The Nimphs Reply to the Sheepheard
July
November
The Nimph Complaining for the Death of Her Faun
Spring
What the Thrush Said

PROGRAM NOTE
Rather than being simply pictorial I wanted these settings to reflect the identification of certain emotions with the progress of the seasons. Thus the text I chose for winter The Nimph Complaining for the Death of Her Faun, while making no mention of snow or ice, is saturated with images of whiteness, loss, and anticipated rebirth. The cycle of seasons is completed with the James Thomson poem Spring, after which follows Keats’s What the Thrush Said acting as a kind of benediction which through its calmness can be seen to contain the troubles and the pleasures of the past year.

TEXTS
The Passionate Shepheard to His Love / The Nimphs Reply to the Sheepheard
Come live with me, and be my Love,
And we will all the pleasures prove,
That Vallies, Groves, hills and fields, 
Woods, or steepie mountaines yeeldes. 

And we will sit upon the Rockes,
Seeing the Shepheards feede their Flockes,
By shallow Rivers, to whose falls, 
Melodious birds sing Madrigalls. 

And I will make thee beds of Roses
And a thousand fragrant poesies,
A cap of flowers, and a kirtle,
Imbroydered all with leaves of Mirtle. 

A gowne made of the finest wooll, 
Which from our pretty Lambs we pull,
Faire lined slippers for the cold: 
With buckles of the purest gold. 

A belt of straw and Ivie buds, 
With Corall clasps and Amber studs
And if these pleasures may thee move,
Come live with me, and be my Love. 

The Shepheard Swaines shall dance and sing, 
For thy delight each May-morning,
If these delights thy minde may move;
Then live with me and be my Love.

*

If all the world and love were young, 
And truth in every Shepheards tongue,
These pretty pleasures might me move,
To live with thee, and be thy Love. 

Time drives the Flockes from field to fold, 
When Rivers rage, and Rockes grow cold,
And Philomell becommeth dombe,
The rest complaines of cares to come. 

The flowers doe fade, and wanton fields,
To wayward Winter reckoning yeelds,
A hony tongue, a heart of gall,
Is fancies spring, but sorrowes fall. 

Thy gownes, thy shooes, thy beds of Roses,
Thy cap, thy kirtle, and thy posies,
Soone breake, soone wither, soone forgotten:
In folly ripe, in reason rotten. 

Thy belts of straw and Ivie buds,
Thy Corall claspes and Amber studs,
All these in me no meanes can move,
To come to thee, and be thy Love. 

But could youth last, and love still breede, 
Had joyes no date, nor age no neede,
Then these delights my minde may move,
To live with thee, and be thy Love.
Christopher Marlowe (1564–1593) 
Sir Walter Raleigh (c.1552–1618) 


July
Loud is the Summer’s busy song,
The smallest breeze can find a tongue, 
While insects of each tiny size
Grow teazing with their melodies,
Till noon burns with its blistering breath,
Around, and day dies still as death.
The busy noise of man and brute
Is on a sudden lost and mute;
Even the brook that leaps along
Seems weary of its bubbling song,
And, so soft its waters creep,
Tired silence sinkes in sounder sleep.
The cricket on its banks is dumb,
The very flies forget to hum;
And, save the waggon rocking round,
The landscape sleeps without a sound.
The breeze is stopt, the lazy bough
Hath not a leaf that dances now;
The tottergrass upon the hill,
And spider’s threads, are standing still:
The feathers dropt from moorhen’s wing 
Which to the water’s surface cling,
Are steadfast, and as heavy seem
As stones beneath them in the stream:
Hawkweed and groundsel’s fanning downs
Unruffled keep their seedy crowns;
And in the oven-heated air,
Not one light thing is floating there
Save that to the earnest eye,
The restless heat seems twittering by.
Noon swoons beneath the heat it made,
And flowers e’en wither in the shade,
Until the sun slopes in the west,
Like weary traveller, glad to rest, 
On pillowed clouds of many hues;
Then nature’s voice its joy renews,
And chequer’d field and grassy plain
Hum, with their summer songs again,
A requiem to the day’s decline, 
Whose setting sunbeams coolly shine,
As welcome to day’s feeble powers
As falling dews to thirsty flowers. 
John Clare (1793–1864) from The Shepherd’s Calendar 


November
The mellow year is hasting to its close; 
The little birds have almost sung their last,
Their small notes twitter in the dreary blast–
That shrill-piped harbinger of early snows;
The patient beauty of the scentless rose,
Oft with the Morn’s hoar crystal quaintly glass’d,
Hangs, a pale mourner for the summer past,
And makes a little summer where it grows:
In the chill sunbeam of the faint brief day
The dusky waters shudder as they shine,
The russet leaves obstruct the struggling way
Of oozy brooks, which no deep banks define,
And the gaunt woods, in ragged, scant array, 
Wrap their old limbs with sombre ivy twine. 
Hartley Coleridge (1796–1849) 


The Nimph Complaining for the Death of Her Faun 
With sweetest milk, and sugar, first
I it at mine own fingers nurst.
And as it grew, so every day
It wax’d more white and sweet than they. 

I have a Garden of my own,
But so with Roses over grown,
And Lillies, that you would guess
To be a little Wilderness. 

For, in the flaxen Lillies shade,
It like a bank of Lillies laid.
Upon the Roses it would feed,
Until its Lips e’vn seem’d to bleed:
And then to me ‘twould boldly trip,
And print those Roses on my Lip.
But all its chief delight was still
On Roses thus its self to fill:
And its pure virgin Limbs to fold
In whitest sheets of Lillies cold.
Had it liv’d long, it would have been
Lillies without, Roses within 

O help! O help! I see it faint
And die as calmely as a Saint.
See how it weeps! The Tears do come
Sad, slowly dropping like a Gumme.
So weeps the wounded Balsome: so
The holy Frankincense doth flow. 

Now my Sweet Faun is vanish’d to 
Whether the Swans and Turtles go:
In fair Elizium to endure, 
With milk-white Lambs, and Ermins pure.
O do not run too fast: for I
Shall but bespeak thy Grave and die.
First my unhappy Statue shall
Be cut in Marble; and withal,
Let it be weeping too: but there
Th’Engraver sure his Art may spare;
For I so truly thee bemoane,
That I shall weep though I be Stone: 
Until my Tears, still dropping, wear 
My breast, themselves engraving there.
There at my feet shalt thou be laid,
Of purest Alabaster made:
For I would have thine Image be 
White as I can, though not as Thee. 

O help! O help! I see it faint
And die as calmely as a Saint. 
Andrew Marvell (1621–1678) 


Spring
Come, gentle Spring, ethereal mildness, come;
And from the bosom of yon dropping cloud, 
While music wakes around, veil’d in a show’r
Of shadowing roses, on our plains descend. 

The blackbird whistles in the thorny brake,
The mellow bullfinch answers from the grove;
Nor are the linnets, o’er the flowering furze
Pour’d out profusely, silent. Join’d to these
Innumerous songsters, in the freshening shade
Of new-sprung leaves, their modulations mix 
Mellifluous. The jay, the rook, the daw,
And each harsh pipe, discordant heard alone, 
Aid the full concert; while the stock-dove breathes
A melancholy murmur thro’ the whole. 
James Thomson (1700–1748) from The Seasons 


What the Thrush Said
O thou whose face hath felt the Winter’s wind, 
Whose eye has seen the snow-clouds hung in mist,
And the black elm tops ‘mong the freezing stars,
To thee the spring will be a harvest-time.
O thou, whose only book has been the light
Of supreme darkness which thou feddest on
Night after night when Phoebus was away,
To thee the Spring shall be a triple morn.
O fret not after knowledge–I have none,
And yet my song comes native with the warmth.
O fret not after knowledge–I have none,
And yet the Evening listens. He who saddens
At thought of idleness cannot be idle,
And he’s awake who thinks himself asleep. 
John Keats (1795–1821)