Into the Wordless

Into the Wordless compares two poems by Walt Whitman, both from his landmark publication Leaves of Grass. These two disparate texts fit together in a hauntingly symbiotic way, and in this setting they are compared musically in two distinct styles that represent a dual-reality experienced by the narrator. As the poems are interwoven section by section, the plagal nature of Gliding Over All joins seamlessly with the pa n-diatonicpatterns in A Clear Midnight, in particular their shared weight of A-flat major – historically theorized as the “key of the grave” (Christian Schubart’s Ideen zu einer Ästhetik der Tonkunst, 1806) – albeit in different harmonic contexts. (Daniel Elder)