John Brown’s Body
orchestral fantasy with narrator
John Brown’s Body was premiered on July 4, 2001 by the Pacific Symphony Orchestra conducted by Jack Everly. G. Randolph Johnson, former Board Chairman of the orchestra, spearheaded the commission and acted as narrator on the evening of the premiere. He writes:
“America seems to have almost forgotten one of its epic poems, John Brown’s Body, the 400page poem about the Civil War by Stephen Vincent Benet. A 1929 Pulitzer Prize winner, the work became very popular in the years that followed. Benet takes both simple and complex characters and weaves them together in a story of incredible intellectual depth and honesty. Moreover, he writes with words that speak directly to the heart in a way that few prose writers can match. Although it may be one of the most under-appreciated works in American literary history, nonetheless it stands as a milestone in our literary evolution and it is still worthy of our attention.
“The main players in the drama are Jack Ellyat, from a small town in Connecticut; Clay Wingate, wealthy scion of a plantation-owning family in Georgia; Abraham Lincoln; and the martyred abolitionist John Brown.”
As composer, I decided the best way of approaching the 14-minute limit of the commission was to introduce the primary characters and their conflicts, providing for the audience a taste of Benet’s complex work. After an orchestra introduction, we meet Jack Ellyat, the hero from the North, whose music is lush and rhapsodic, as he dreams about the land around him. Then we meet Clay Wingate, Ellyat’s Southern counterpart, whose contrasting music is quick and fleeting as he rides home to his estate. Both introductions close with an ominous premonition of the darkness and calamity ahead. A brief description of the Battle of Bull Run leads into music of Lincoln, as he wrestles with the problem of uniting a torn nation. Out of his despair, we hear a suggestion of the introductory music—optimistic and bright— which we now understand to be John Brown’s theme. Brown prays for courage, defends himself in his own trial hearing, welcoming his inevitable demise: “I am worth now infinitely more to die than to live...there is a song in my bones...it will grow stronger.”
INSTRUMENTATION
Piccolo
2 Flutes
2 Oboes
English Horn
2 Clarinets in B
Bass Clarinet in B
2 Bassoons
Contrabassoon
4 Horns in F
3 Trumpets in C
2 Trombones
Bass Trombone
Tuba
Timpani
Percussion
Piano Harp
Strings
duration: approx. 14 minutes
Text by Stephen Vincent Benet. Used by permission of Robert A. Freedman Agency, Copyright © 1927 by Stephen Vincent Benet, Copyright Renewal © 1955, 1956 by Rosemary Carr Benet. All Rights Reserved.
JOHN BROWN'S BODY
Flute 1 .2
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NARRATOR: Jack Ellyat had been out all day, alone except for his new gun and Ned, the setter, the old wise dog with Autumn in his eyes, who stepped the fallen leaves so delicately they barely rustled. He'd meant to hunt, but let the gun rest on his shoulder.
NARRATOR: He felt the turning of the year stir in his blood like drowsy fiddle music, and knew that he was glad to be Connecticut-born. So, with his back against a tree, he stared at the pure, golden feathers in the West until the sunset flowed into his heart. There was a fairy hush.
NARRATOR: Then something broke the peace. Like the wind it was, the flutter ofrising wind, and it grew until it became the rushing of winged stallions, distant and terrible, thundering beyond the sky.
[This bar may be held while narrator finishes]
Meanwhile in Georgia, Clay Wingate dreamed. Clay's face looked lucky enough to anyone that had seen him then, riding back through the Georgia Fall to the white-pillared porch of
[This bar may be held while narrator finishes]
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senza sord.
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NAR: Fall of the 'possum, fall of the 'coon and the lop-eared hound-dog baying at the moon. A smokiness so vague in the air you feel it rather than see it there, a brief, white rime on the red clay road and slow mules creaking a lazy load through endless acres of afternoon. This was his Georgia. He drank his fill of the air and was about to move on again, when… what was that noise beyond the sky, that harry of unseen cavalry riding the wind?
p J p p p p
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Deliberate; dignified q =120
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lontano, sempre sostenuto
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LDeliberate; dignified q =120
NAR: At Bull Run, the day broke hot and calm. At the stone bridge, a Union gun opened fire. Jack Ellyat heard the fire with a thump in his heart. He knew they were going to be in it soon. And then they were down on the ground and they were firing. That’s OK, you just fired like you did at drill. The South prepares for a charge. The charge sweeps up the plateau. The Union line is a solid crescent, and then a crescent of sand, and then split sand, and streaming away. There is no panic at first, there is just a moment when men have borne enough and begin to go home.
(This bar may be held longer if time is needed for narrator to "catch up")
lontano, sempre sostenuto
S.
NAR: Horace Greeley has written Lincoln an hysterical letter from New York. He pleads for an armistice. “On every brow sits sullen, scorching, black despair.” Lincoln, awkwardly enduring, confused by a thousand counsels, is neither overwhelmed nor touched to folly. Defeat is a fact and victory can be a fact. His huge, patient, laborious hands start kneading the stuff of the Union together again. “What is God's will? They come to me and talk about God's will in righteous deputations and platoons, and all of 'em are sure they know God's will. I am the only man who does not know it. And yet, if God should state His will to others, on a point of my own duty, it might be thought He would reveal it to me directly, more especially as I so earnestly desire to know His will. I am a patient man and I can wait. Patience is my only virtue as I see it, the ability to wait and hold my own and to keep my resolves once they are made. I mean to hold this Union together by whatever means these hands can find under the Constitition.
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Hn 1.2 Hn 3.4 Tpt 1 Tpt 2.3
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= 84 P
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NAR: There was a whisper moving in the air that night, a whisper that cried and whimpered about the house where John Brown prayed to his God, by his narrow bed. “For fifty-nine unsparing years, Thy grace has worked apart to mold a man of iron tears with a bullet for a heart. Get up, get up my hearty sons! From this day forth we are no longer men, but pikes and guns in God’s advancing war. And if we live we free the slave, and if we die we die. But God has digged his Saints a grave beyond the western sky.
[pause]
There is a song in my bones. There is a song in my white bones. Bind my white bones together--hollow them to skeleton pipes of music. When the wind blows from the budded Spring, the song will blow. My bones have been washed clean and God blows through them with a hollow sound. I hear it now faint as the multitudinous, tiny sigh of grasses underneath a windy scythe. Now if it is deemed necessary that I should forfeit my life for the furtherance of the ends of justice and mingle my blood with the blood of my children and the blood of millions in the slave country, whose rights are disregarded by wicked, cruel and unjust enactments, I say, let it be done.
= 84 P
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mf espress. mf espress. mf espress. mf mf a2 senza sord.
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senza sord. senza sord.
NAR: The South came and the end came, and the grass comes and the wind blows on the bronze book on the bronze men on the grown grass, and the wind says: Long ago, Long ago.
TUTTI: fff, con forza TUTTI: sfffz
TUTTI: fff, con forza
TUTTI: fff, con forza
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