THE POET

At an early age, Gerard Manley Hopkins wrestled with the decision to become a Jesuit priest against the will of his family, leaving his life as a scholar and poet behind. Yet he continued to keep a journal of his vivid responses to nature as well as his expression of a philosophy that emphasized the individuality of every natural thing, which he called "inscape."

Hopkins later returned to college to study theology and it was there that he began to write poetry again. Inspired by the death of five Franciscan nuns in a shipwreck in 1875, he broke a seven-year silence and wrote, The Wreck of the Deutschland, in which he experimented with a new rhythm, including The Windhover, one of the most frequently analyzed poems in the English language.

Hopkins sought a stronger "rhetoric of verse." His exploitation of the verbal subtleties and music of English, were all in the interest of projecting deep personal experiences, including his sense of God's mystery, grandeur, and mercy, as well as his joy in "all things counter, original, spare, strange," as he wrote in Pied Beauty. He called the energizing prosodic element of his unique verse "sprung rhythm," in which each foot may consist of one stressed syllable and any number of unstressed syllables, instead of the regular number of syllables used in traditional meter. The result is a muscular verse, flexible, intense, vibrant, and organic, that combines accuracy of observation, imaginative daring, deep feeling, and intellectual depth.

THE COMPOSER

"At times I feel that some other force is writing music through me and that I do not even write a given score...it feels almost as if I found it there!" Augusta Read Thomas described how composing is an extension of who she is as opposed to a career of choice. Although her composing is a spiritual experience, she seems quite deliberate about her process of writing down what she hears as she describes her approach to composing Daylight Divine.

Thomas is a brilliant, young composer with more than 300 original compositions to her credit. She writes in a colorful, bold, concise, intense, yet elegant musical style. Her works have been widely heard and well received and they have won many awards including a Grammy award for Chanticleer's Colors of Love, a recording of new choral music from today's most gifted composers. Among her many achievements are the positions of Composer in Residence for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and professor of composition at the Eastman School of Music.

As a vivacious and optimistic individual, Augusta Read Thomas embraces the complexities of music and expresses them in a way that allows art and culture to flourish.

COMPOSER'S COMMENTS

Augusta Read Thomas reveals the compositional beginnings of Daylight Divine.

Gerard Manley Hopkins was born in 1844, and died in 1889, at the age of 45. His poems illustrate an extraordinary sensitivity to gracefulness and beauty in nature and in mankind. The musicality, honesty, passion, and penetration of the poems of Hopkins attract me to his work for our project.

Knowing that the work would premiere in the Saint-Denis Basilica, it seemed fitting in so many ways to set The Windover and Pied Beauty in this piece. Gerard Manley Hopkins was a Jesuit priest and his poems approach the world with a deep devotion to God.

I quote Catherine Phillips, who wrote: "The central experience of Gerard Manley Hopkins' life was an experience of feeling God's presence in nature so that perceiving the essence or "inscape" of a thing was to perceive some part of God and even to feel at times that it was possible to communicate directly with him through nature. Nature and religious worship infuse one another. Gerard Manley Hopkins invented a second term, 'instress', to indicate the force that held the thing or the individual together or described a momentary flash of communication between the observer and the thing observed."

Hopkins was independent thinking and his sense of rhythm and rhyme (he invented the term "sprung rhythm") are magical and musical.

My plan is to set The Windover and Pied Beauty in an extremely "musical" manner, listening to the sound of the poems and deeply understanding their meaning in my heart and soul. There will be orchestral interludes and I will divide the children's chorus into several subdivisions, allowing for counterpoint and antiphonal sections. The words and meanings of the Hopkins texts are so intensely mature ("My heart in hiding stirred for a bird"), and at the same time so playful ("For skies of couple-color as a brinded cow"). Therefore, having a mature soprano voice along with young voices seems to capture the essence of the poems and their spirituality.