"I Thank You God" by Gwyneth Walker, performed by Vox Grata Women's Choir
Video Information
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I Thank You God was commissioned by the American Choral Directors Association (ACDA) and premiered at the National ACDA Convention in February, 1999. The text is adapted from the E.E. Cummings poem of the same name.
Composer Gwyneth Walker ... moreI Thank You God was commissioned by the American Choral Directors Association (ACDA) and premiered at the National ACDA Convention in February, 1999. The text is adapted from the E.E. Cummings poem of the same name.
Composer Gwyneth Walker writes: "This is a poem of grandeur and of praise. Therefore it might be expected that this musical setting would aim at vastness, grandeur and awakening." Walker accomplishes this through a variety of means. First, the piano introduction includes slowly unfolding piano arpeggios which focus on open intervals of octaves, fifths and fourths, exploiting the full range of the piano keyboard. The composer also takes the singers on a harmonic journey which begins in a low register in C minor, and then travels through a number of other key areas until it reaches the distant key of G-flat. At this point, the voices are drawn closely together into a tone cluster containing the pitches G-flat, A-flat and B-flat, only to open apart into the glorious C major chords which conclude the piece in the high register.
The speaker in the poem is almost breathless as he expresses his wonder at the natural world. In the customary style of the poet, the speaker hardly pauses, having no space even for punctuation. Walker conveys this aspect of the text through a number of sequences of the phrase "I thank you God" and through static melodic lines to set the poet's adjectives ("how should tasting touching hearing seeing breathing any human merely being doubt you?").
A central phrase, "I who have died am alive again today" returns frequently and expresses the rebirth of the soul with each "amazing day".
In this video, Vox Grata Women's Choir of Nashville, under the direction of Jeanette MacCallum, performs their signature finale. less
