M1: Life M2: Birth

PRESENTED IN EIGHT MOVEMENTS FEATURING JAZZ VOCALIST KURT ELLING WITH JAZZ QUARTET, ORCHESTRA AND TREBLE CHOIR.

COMPOSED & CONDUCTED BY RICHARD DEROSA

Funding for Life in Poetry & Music provided by the University of North Texas Institute for the Advancement of the Arts faculty fellowship (IAA). The Faculty Fellows program allows faculty members a semester of leave to pursue creative research in the arts. The IAA serves to promote artistic and creative expression at UNT.

1. LIFE: OVERVIEW

LIFE – EDITH WHARTON Life, like a marble block, is given to all, A blank, inchoate mass of years and days, Whence one with ardent chisel swift essays Some shape of strength or symmetry to call; One shatters it in bits to mend a wall; One in a craftier hand the chisel lays, And one, to wake the mirth in Lesbia’s gaze, Carves it apace in toys fantastical. But least is he who, with enchanted eyes, Filled with high visions of fair shapes to be, Muses which god he shall immortalize In the proud Parian’s perpetuity, Till twilight warns him from the punctual skies That the night cometh wherein none shall see.

2. BIRTH: INTIMACY, FASCINATION

SOUL’S BIRTH – SARA TEASDALE When you were born, beloved, was your soul New made by God to match your body’s flower, And were they both at one same precious hour Sent forth from heaven as a perfect whole? Or had your soul since dim creation burned, A star in some still region of the sky, That leaping earthward, left its place on high And to your little new-born body yearned? No words can tell in what celestial hour God made your soul and gave it mortal birth, Nor in the disarray of all the stars Is any place so sweet that such a flower Might linger there until thro’ heaven’s bars, It heard God’s voice that bade it down to earth.