Dirge Without Music

Stacy Garrop’s DIRGE WITHOUT WORDS is a dramatic setting of Edna St. Vincent Millay’s elegiac poem of the same name. The music gives voice to the mournful, yet defiant, character of the poetry, which commits the precious lives of the dead to the ground, while refusing to give approval to the realities of death and the grave. Garrop’s setting begins softly and somberly, the voice accompanied by sparse, shadowy lines in the piano. As the music seamlessly expands, becoming quite passionate, it features rich, full chordal textures and emphatic melodic gestures for the pianist, while rendering the nuances of Millay’s words with sensitive text-painting in the vocal line. The singer’s full range is on display, building to a fortissimo high C at the final, lyrical declamation that she is “not resigned” to death.