THE FLORIDA STATE UNIVERSITY College of Music presents
Faculty Recital
Marcía Porter, Soprano
Elizabeth Avery, Piano
Shannon Thomas, Violin
Sunday, October 19, 2025 4:00 p.m. | Longmire Recital Hall
To Ensure An Enjoyable Concert Experience For All…
Please refrain from talking, entering, or exiting during performances. Food and drink are prohibited in all concert halls. Recording or broadcasting of the concert by any means, including the use of digital cameras, cell phones, or other devices is expressly forbidden. Please deactivate all portable electronic devices including watches, cell phones, pagers, hand-held gaming devices or other electronic equipment that may distract the audience or performers.
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Florida State University provides accommodations for persons with disabilities. Please notify the College of Music at (850) 644-3424 at least five working days prior to a musical event to request accommodation for disability or alternative program format.
PROGRAM
Clairières dans le ciel
Lili Boulanger
2. Elle est gravement gaie (1893–1918)
6. Si tout ceci n’est qu’un pauvre rêve
7. Nous nous aimerons tant
8. Vous m’avez regardé avec toute votre âme
9. Les lilas qui avainet fleuri
Sonnets of Love, Rosebuds, and Death
Dorothy Rudd Moore
1. Had No Thought of Violets of Late (1940–2022)
2. Joy
3. Some Things Are Very Dear to Me
4. He Came in Silvern Armour
5. Song for a Dark Girl
6. Idolatry
7. Youth Sings a Song of Rosebuds
8. Invocation
Nocturne
Shannon Thomas, violin
INTERMISSION
Shannon Thomas, violin
Lili Boulanger
Three Moods of the Sea
Ethel Smyth Requies (1858–1944) Before the Squall After Sunset
Menuet
Cécile Chaminade
La lune paresseuse (1854–1944)
Viens, mon bien-aimé
L’absente
from Clairières dans le ciel (1914)
Poet: Francis Jammes
Elle est gravement gaie
Elle est gravement gaie. Par moments son regard se levait comme pour surprendre ma pensée.
Elle était douce alors comme quand il est tard le velours jaune et bleu d’une allée de pensées.
Si tout ceci n’est qu’un pauvre rêve
Si tout ceci n’est qu’un pauvre rêve, et s’il faut que j’ajoute dans ma vie, une fois encore, la désillusion aux désillusions; et, si je dois encore, par ma sombre folie, chercher dans la douceur du vent et de la pluie les seules vaines voix qui m’aient en passion; je ne sais si je guérirai, ô mon amie …
Nous nous aimerons tant
Nous nous aimerons tant que nous tairons nos mots, en nous tendant la main, quand nous nous reverrons.
Vous serez ombragée par d’anciens rameaux sur le banc que je sais où nous nous assoierons.
Donc nous nous assoierons sur ce banc tous deux seuls …
D’un long moment, ô mon amie, vous n’oserez …
Que vous me serez douce et que je tremblerai …
Vous m’avez regardé avec toute votre âme
Vous m’avez regardé avec toute votre âme.
Vous m’avez regardé longtemps comme un ciel bleu.
J’ai mis votre regard à l’ombre de mes yeux …
Que ce regard était passionné et calme …
Les lilas qui avaient fleuri
Les lilas qui avaient fleuri l’année dernière vont fleurir de nouveau dans les tristes parterres.
Déjà le pêcher grêle a jonché le ciel bleu de ses roses, comme un enfant la Fête-Dieu.
Mon cœur devrait mourir au milieu de ces choses car c’était au milieu des vergers blancs et roses que j’avais espéré je ne sais quoi de vous. Mon âme rêve sourdement sur vos genoux. Ne la repoussez point. Ne la relevez pas de peur qu’en s’éloignant de vous elle ne voie combien vous êtes faible et troublée dans ses bras.
She is gravely cheerful
She is gravely cheerful. At times her gaze would lift as if to capture my thoughts. She was soft then, like when it’s late the yellow and blue velvet of an avenue of pansies.
If all this is only a poor dream
If all this is only a poor dream, and if I must add to my life, once again, disillusionment to disillusionment; and if I must still, through my dark madness, seek in the gentleness of the wind and the rain the only futile voices that love me; I do not know if I will recover, oh my friend...
We will love each other so much
We will love each other so much that we will keep silent, holding out our hands, when we meet again. You will be shaded by ancient branches on the bench where I know we will both sit. So we will sit on this bench, the two of us alone... For a long time, oh my friend, you will not dare... How gentle you will be and how I will tremble...
You looked at me with all your soul
You looked at me with all your soul. You looked at me for a long time, like a blue sky. I placed your gaze in the shadow of my eyes... How passionate and calm that gaze was...
The lilacs that bloomed
The lilacs that bloomed last year will bloom again in the sad flowerbeds. Already the slender peach tree has strewn the blue sky with its pinks, like a child at Corpus Christi. My heart should die amidst these things for it was amidst the white and pink orchards that I do not know what had hoped I from you. My soul dreams idly on your lap. Do not push it away. Do not lift it up for fear that, by moving away from you, it might see how weak and troubled you are in its arms.
Sonnets of Love, Rosebuds, and Death
1. I had no thoughts of violets of late Alice Ruth Moore (1875-1935), as Alice Nelson Dunbar
I had no thoughts of violets of late,
The wild, shy kind that spring beneath your feet In wistful April days, when lovers mate And wander through the fields in raptures sweet. The thought of violets meant florists’ shops, And bows and pins, and perfumed papers fine; And garnish lights, and mincing little fops And cabarets and songs, and deadening wine. So far from sweet real things my thoughts had strayed, I had forgot wide fields, and clear brown streams; The perfect loveliness that God has made, -Wild violets shy and Heaven-mounting dreams. And now -- unwittingly, you’ve made me dream Of violets, and my soul’s forgotten gleam.
2. Joy
Clarissa M. Scott Delany (1901-1927)
Joy shakes me like the wind that lifts a sail, Like the roistering wind
That laughs through stalwart pines. It floods me like the sun
On rain-drenched trees
That flash with silver and green, I abandon myself to joy I laugh -- I sing.
Too long have I walked a desolate way, Too long stumbled down a maze Bewildered.
3. Some things are very dear to me
Poet: Gwendolyn Bennett (1902–1981)
Some things are very dear to me—
Such things as flowers bathed by rain Or patterns traced upon the sea Or crocuses where snow has lain … the iridescence of a gem, The moon’s cool opalescent light, Azaleas and the scent of them, And honeysuckles in the night. And many sounds are also dear— Like winds that sing among the trees Or crickets calling from the weir Or Negroes humming melodies. But dearer far than all surmise Are sudden tear-drops in your eyes.
4. He came in silvern armour
Poet: Gwendolyn Bennett
He came in silvern armour, trimmed with black— A lover come from legends long ago— With silver spurs and silken plumes a-blow, And flashing sword caught fast and buckled back In a carven sheath of Tamarack.
He came with footsteps beautifully slow, And spoke in voice meticulously low.
He came and Romance followed in his track…
I did not ask his name—I thought him Love; I did not care to see his hidden face.
All life seemed born in my intaken breath; All thought seemed flown like some forgotten dove. He bent to kiss and raised his visor’s lace…
All eager-lipped I kissed the mouth of Death.
5. Song For a Dark Girl
Poet: Langston Hughes (1901-1967)
Way Down South in Dixie (Break the heart of me)
They hung my black young lover
To a cross roads tree.
Way Down South in Dixie (Bruised body high in air)
I asked the white Lord Jesus
What was the use of prayer.
Way Down South in Dixie (Break the heart of me)
Love is a naked shadow
On a gnarled and naked tree.
6. Idolatry
Poet: Arna Wendell Bontemps (1902-1973)
You have been good to me, I give you this
7. Youth Sings a Song of Rosebuds
Poet: Countee Cullen (1903–1946)
Since men grow diffident at last, And care no whit at all, If spring be come, or the fall be past, Or how the cool rains fall, I come to no flower but I pluck, I raise no cup but I sip, For a mouth is the best of sweets to suck; The oldest wine’s on the lip. If I grow old in a year or two, And come to the querulous song Of ‘Alack and aday’ and ‘This was true, And that, when I was young,’ I must have sweets to remember by, Some blossom saved from the mire, Some death-rebellious ember I Can fan into a fire.
8. Invocation
Helene Johnson (1906-1995)
Let me be buried in the rain
In a deep, dripping wood, Under the warm wet breast of Earth
Where once a gnarled tree stood. And paint a picture on my tomb
With dirt and a piece of bough
Of a girl and a boy beneath a round, ripe moon
Eating of love with an eager spoon And vowing an eager vow. And do not keep my plot mowed smooth And clean as a spinster’s bed, But let the weed, the flower, the tree, Riotous, rampant, wild and free, Grow high above my head.
Three Moods of the Sea (1913)
Poet: Arthur Symons (1865–1945)
Requies
O is it death or life that sounds
Like something strangely known
In this subsiding out of strife, This low sea monotone?
A sound scarce heard through sleep
Murmurs as the August bees
That fill the forest hollows deep
About the roots of trees.
O is it death or life, or is it
Hope or memory
That quiets all things with this breath
Of the eternal sea?
Before the squall
The wind is rising on the sea, The windy white foam dancers leap; And the sea moans uneasily, And turns to sleep, and cannot sleep.
Ridge after rocky ridge uplifts wild hands, And hammers at the land, Scatters in liquid dust, and drifts
To death among the dusty sand.
On the horizon’s nearing line,
Where the sky rests a visible wall, Grey in the offing I divine
The sails that fly before a squall.
After sunset
The sea lies quieted beneath The after sunset flush
That leaves upon the heap’d grey clouds
The grapes faint purple blush.
Pale, from a little space in heaven
Of delicate ivory.
The sickle moon and one gold star
Look down upon the sea.