Program Note

This piece marks a special time and place in my life because I began working on it during a weeklong composers workshop conducted by Alice Parker at her home in Hawley, MA. Four other composers and I shared a farmhouse during the third week in October, 2007. The atmosphere depicted in “Aftermath” was reflected in our own season and surroundings. While Aftermath tells the annual fruitless story of life after the autumn harvest, I imagined a community coming together to mourn, in a ritualistic way, after a tragic event.

Aftermath

When the summer fields are mown, 
When the birds are fledged and flown,
And the dry leaves strew the path;
With the falling of the snow,
With the cawing of the crow, 
Once again the fields we mow
And gather in the aftermath.  

Not the sweet, new grass with flowers
Is this harvesting of ours;
Not the upland clover bloom; 
But the rowen mixed with weeds, 
Tangled tufts from marsh and meads,
Where the poppy drops its seeds
In the silence and the gloom.

By Henry Wadsworth Longfellow