[TOP: Love Rejoices: Songs of H. Leslie Adams; Darryl Taylor, tenor; Albany Records Troy 428 BOTTOM: H. Leslie Adams]
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On February 13th, from 10 to 11 pm, listen online at wrti.org or on WRTI HD-2 to Kile Smith's Contemporary American Music show, Now is the Time. Works by David Snow, Wendy Mae Chambers, and H. Leslie Adams will warm you up for Valentine's Day! The show begins in winter and ends with intimations of spring. The appropriately named composer David Snow shares with us the haunting Winter for trumpet and piano. The second movement from the Symphony of the Universe by the always-engaging Wendy Mae Chambers is called 'Organism.' She wrote for a big-band jazz ensemble to be recorded in the cavernous Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City, and the results are stunning.
"The song cycle The Wider View comes from the romantic and lyrical pen of H. Leslie Adams. Poems of Paul Laurence Dunbar, Langston Hughes, and others lead to the final 'Love Rejoices' by James Dillet Freeman. '...O love, come close and circumscribe me round / With love's dear otherness, encompass me / In bonds so fair for when I am bound by love / on ev'ry side, / Then I am free. / O love, you are the only narrow door through which myself can reach to the yet more. / And Love Rejoices, Love Rejoice!'
Love Rejoices
(James Dillet Freeman)
I walk alone upon a lonely beach
And none but I walk here.
On ev'ry side the world is mine as far as I can reach
Oh, the sea and sky and earth stretch wide.
Why am I then as if confined
When I have all this endless ev'rywhere?
Who locks me in this cage of mind?
And why is this bare world so hard to bear?
O love, come close and circumscribe me round
With love's dear otherness, encompass me
In bonds so fair for when I am bound by love
on ev'ry side,
Then I am free.
O love, you are the only narrow door through which myself can reach to the yet more.
And Love Rejoices, Love Rejoice!"
[H. Leslie Adams (b. 1932) is profiled at AfriClassical.com, which features a comprehensive Works List by Prof. Dominique-René de Lerma of Lawrence University Conservatory]
1 comment:
If you like this poem by James Dillet Freeman, then I encourage you to read "I AM THERE", a copy of which was carried to and left on the moon by Apollo 15 astronaut Jim Irwin.
A literal response to Freeman's prayer for his wife, who was undergoing surgery for late-stage cancer, the poem's enduring promise now remains a universal light to all those facing the darkness of fear and grief.
"I Am There" can be found at
http://www.unity.org/prayer/prayersAffirmations/iAmTherepoem.html
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