From the composer:

I wrote Strange Music for my final concert with the Lehigh University Choir in 2024. I wanted to write a work about Lehigh students – how I’ve seen them grow–their struggles and their victories–as they discovered who they were as they came more into being adults. The poems I chose to set center around identity: the question of how we find and realize who we are.
In G.K. Chesterton’s “The Strange Music” – from which the whole work takes its title – the harper is learning, discovering master of the instrument. This becomes the central metaphor of the work: as we learn and grow, we find our own true voice; and when we do, “the stars stand still to hear” it.

The second movement, a soprano solo, speaks of “plucking my soul out of its secret place” and seeing it as “a twitching body,” and “a spark shining on my face.” The poem concludes with the “narcotic thought: I know my soul”.

The third poem is about the struggles adolescents often find when they encounter a sense of isolation: “who I am, none cares or knows.” “Even the ones I love the best” are strangers.
The fourth poem is the most introspective in the set: the poet John Clare thought of noon-time as a special moment when light was refracted prismatically, like “crooked bits of glass.” We can get lost, hypnotically, in a kind of fun-house mirror, out of time and out of synch with who we are.
The fifth movement, a baritone solo, start with searching: “I cannot find my way;” but in facing his fears, he hears a “lost imperial music” – and “above it all sees the glory of the light.”
The set concludes with a reprise of the Strange Music, the harper having learned to play his instrument, and – we hope –found his voice.

The first movement of Strange Music was originally commissioned by John Wilson and the 2022-2023 Bridgewater-Raritan High School Symphonic Choir and Made possible by the BRHS Choir Parents’ Organization and the Kimberly A. Nelson Foundation.

I. THE STRANGE MUSIC
Other loves may sink and settle, other loves may loose and slack,
But I wander like a minstrel with a harp upon his back,
Though the harp be on my bosom, though I finger and I fret,
Still, my hope is all before me: for I cannot play it yet.
In your strings is hid a music that no hand hath e’er let fall,
In your soul is sealed a pleasure that you have not known at all;
Pleasure subtle as your spirit, strange and slender as your frame,
Fiercer than the pain that folds you, softer than your sorrow’s name.
Not as mine, my soul’s annointed, not as mine the rude and light
Easy mirth of many faces, swaggering pride of song and fight;
Something stranger, something sweeter, something waiting you afar,
Secret as your stricken senses, magic as your sorrows are.
But on this, God’s harp supernal, stretched but to be stricken once,
Hoary time is a beginner, Life a bungler, Death a dunce.
But I will not fear to match them—no, by God, I will not fear,
I will learn you, I will play you and the stars stand still to hear.
– G. K. Chesterton (1874-1936)

II. RÊVERIE (I Know My Soul)
I plucked my soul out of its secret place,
And held it to the mirror of my eye,
To see it like a star against the sky,
A twitching body quivering in space,
A spark of passion shining on my face.
And I explored it to determine why
This awful key to my infinity
Conspires to rob me of sweet joy and grace.
And if the sign may not be fully read,
If I can comprehend but not control,
I need not gloom my days with futile dread,
Because I see a part and not the whole.
Contemplating the strange, I’m comforted
By this narcotic thought: I know my soul.
–Claude McKay (1889-1948)

III. I AM
I am—yet what I am none cares or knows;
My friends forsake me like a memory lost:
I am the self-consumer of my woes—
They rise and vanish in oblivious host,
Like shadows in love’s frenzied stifled throes…

Even the dearest that I loved the best
Are strange—nay, rather, stranger [somehow stranger] than the rest.
–John Clare (1793–1864)

IV. INTERMEZZO (From Noon)
From Noon
…the dazzled eye surveys
All around a liquid blaze;
And amid the scorching gleams,
If we earnest look, it seems
As if crooked bits of glass
Seem’d repeatedly to pass.”
–John Clare (1793–1864)

V. “CREDO”
I cannot find my way: there is no star
In all the shrouded heavens anywhere;
And there is not a whisper in the air
Of any living voice but one so far
That I can hear it only as a bar
Of lost, imperial music…

For through it all – above, beyond it all –
I know the far-sent message of the years,
I feel the coming glory of the Light.

-Edwin Arlington Robinson