What Is Beauty, Then?

for SSATB chorus

1976

3.5 minutes

Text: Christopher Marlowe

Commission: Crescent City Chamber Choir

Premiere: Crescent City Chamber Choir
St. Stephen's Church, New Orleans, LA
Nov 21, 1976

Publisher: Lawson-Gould

Notes: I have loved the rhetorical beauty of English Renaissance language (Shakespeare, Marlowe, Robert Herrick, The Book of Common Prayer, The King James Bible, and so on) ever since I was a teenager. I sang in a madrigal group as an undergraduate, and at times this work reveals an affinity with the English madrigalists. It uses, for example, imitative counterpoint and word play. For example at the phrase “as in a mirror” the counterpoint uses inversions of prior melodic material.

This work anticipates my later conscious decision to approach all my compositions from a rhetorical viewpoint. In this case I strived to create a final musical passage for the work that would mirror the eloquence of Marlowe’s closing words.