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Four Early Songs
1976–1982

voice
piano

SCORE
Les Colchiques
Sweet Peg
Christopher Boyce's Suicide Note
On Chloris Walking in the Snow

In 1982 I collected 32 songs, including these, to be performed individually or in sets as
Songbook 1. Most of the very earliest of these were virtually unperformable as originally
notated: unrealisticallly fast, vast vocal leaps, obsessive use of articulations and dynamic
swivels. As they appear here the most egregious naivities have been cleaned up, but I've
tried to maintain the spirit as intended. It was kind of sweet to see what the 25-year-old
me was doing to desperately try to appear 'modern' on the page, when my music has always
been, at heart, deeply triadic.

TEXTS
LES COLCHIQUES
The meadow is poisonous but pretty in autumn. 
The cows that graze there are slowly poisoned.
Meadow saffron, the colour of lilacs, and of shadows under the eyes, 
Grows there, your eyes are like these flowers.
Mauve as their shadows
And mauve as this autumn, 
And for your eyes' sake my life is slowly poisoned. 

Children from school come with their commotion. 
Dressed in smocks and playing the mouth organ
Picking autumn crocuses which are like their mothers
Daughters of their daughters and the colour of your eyelids
which flutter like flowers in the mad breeze blown. 

The cowherd sings softly to himself all alone 
While slow moving, lowing, 
The cows leave behind them forever this great meadow ill flowered by the autumn. 

Guillaume Apollinaire (1880–1918) trans. Oliver Bernard 


SWEET PEG
Oh, the month of May, the merry month of May,
So frolic, so gay, and so green, so green, so green!
O, and then did I unto my true love say,
Sweet Peg, thou shalt be my Summer's Queen.

Now the nightingale, the pretty nightingale,
The sweetest singer in all the forest quire,
Entreats thee, sweet Peggy, to hear thy true love's tale:
Lo, yonder she sitteth, her breast against a briar.

But O, I spy the cuckoo, the cuckoo, the cuckoo;
See where she sitteth; come away, my joy:
Come away, I prithee, I do not like the cuckoo
Should sing where my Peggy and I kiss and toy.

O, the month of May, the merry month of May,
So frolic, so gay, and so green, so green, so green;
And then did I unto my true love say,
Sweet Peg, thou shalt be my Summer's Queen. 

Thomas Dekker (1570-1632)


CHRISTOPHER BOYCE'S SUICIDE NOTE
My thoughts are a jumble. My emotions are bled white. I have become callous. I have been dancing on a razor. I close my eyes and I feel my falcon beating hard into the wind. 

Christopher Boyce (b.1953)


ON CHLORIS WALKING IN THE SNOW
I saw fair Chloris walk alone, 
Whilst feather'd rain came softly down, 
And Jove descended from his tower 
To court her in a silver shower. 
The wanton snow flew on her breast 
Like little birds unto their nest; 
But overcome with whiteness there, 
For grief it thaw'd into a tear; 
Thence falling on her garment's hem, 
To deck her, froze into a gem. 

William Strode (1602-1645)