Aristotle —1998
Aristotle was commissioned and premiered by the Ithaca College Choir, and later recorded on the album The Wishing Tree by the Chamber Choirs of Haverford and Bryn Mawr Colleges, conducted by Thomas Lloyd. The text for Aristotle is by poet Billy Collins, who said: ‘Aristotle’ arose out of reading Aristotle’s Poetics, where he annunciates for the first time a notion very common to us, which is that a literary work has three parts: a beginning, a middle, and an end.
Program Notes
Billy Collins’ poem “Aristotle” delighted me the first time I heard it because I’ve always been fascinated by form and its relationship to content. As Collin’s poem is about, among other things, structure, I felt compelled to write music that approaches form in a “unconventionally” conventional way: the forms of my pieces often grow out of the content; in Collins’ “Aristotle” the content of the poem is form, so the musical form grows out of a poetic discussion of form. The music of the first section is all about ideas beginning, taking shape, never quite reaching fruition – because “almost anything can happen.” The music of the second section revels in creating tension in various ways, mainly through increasing dissonance in the harmony and chord relationships. The final section offers various resolutions, winding downs, ways of coming to rest.
Text
Aristotle by Billy Collins
This is the beginning.
Almost anything can happen here.
This is where you find
the creation of light, a fish wriggling onto land,
the first word of Paradise Lost on an empty page.
Think of an egg, the letter A,
a woman ironing on a bare stage
as the heavy curtain rises.
This is the very beginning.
The first-person narrator introduces himself,
tells us about his lineage.
The mezzo-soprano stands in the wings.
Here the climbers are studying a map
or pulling on their long woolen socks.
This is early on, years before the Ark, dawn.
The profile of an animal is being smeared
on the wall of a cave,
and you have not yet learned to crawl.
This is the opening, the gambit,
a pawn moving forward an inch.
This is your first night with her,
your first night without her.
This is the first part
where the wheels begin to turn,
where the elevator begins its ascent,
before the doors lurch apart.
This is the middle.
Things have had time to get complicated,
messy, really. Nothing is simple anymore.
Cities have sprouted up along the rivers
teeming with people at cross-purposes—
a million schemes, a million wild looks.
Disappointment unshoulders his knapsack
here and pitches his ragged tent.
This is the sticky part where the plot congeals,
where the action suddenly reverses
or swerves off in an outrageous direction.
Here the narrator devotes a long paragraph
to why Miriam does not want Edward’s child.
Someone hides a letter under a pillow.
Here the aria rises to a pitch,
a song of betrayal, salted with revenge.
And the climbing party is stuck on a ledge
halfway up the mountain.
This is the bridge, the painful modulation.
This is the thick of things.
So much is crowded into the middle—
the guitars of Spain, piles of ripe avocados,
Russian uniforms, noisy parties,
lakeside kisses, arguments heard through a wall—
too much to name, too much to think about.
And this is the end,
the car running out of road,
the river losing its name in an ocean,
the long nose of the photographed horse
touching the white electronic line.
This is the colophon, the last elephant in the parade,
the empty wheelchair,
and pigeons floating down in the evening.
Here the stage is littered with bodies,
the narrator leads the characters back to their cells,
and the climbers are in their graves.
It is me hitting the period
and you closing the book.
It is Sylvia Plath in the kitchen
and St. Clement with an anchor around his neck.
This is the final bit
thinning away to nothing.
This is the end, according to Aristotle,
what we have all been waiting for,
what everything comes down to,
the destination we cannot help imagining,
a streak of light in the sky,
a hat on a peg, and outside the cabin, falling leaves.
