By James Dever jamesdever Bandcamp tylerdever Bandcamp jamesdevermusic SoundCloud jamzdenver Twitter.
Released 6/6/2016.
Duration: 4:42.

Listen on SoundCloud or YouTube.

Read artist commentary.

Contributors:

• Will Ecker (conduction)

Lyrics:

As the rain hides the stars,
As the autumn mist
Hides the hills,
As the clouds veil
The blue of the sky, so
The dark happenings of my lot
Hide the shining of thy face from me.
Yet, if I may hold thy hand in the darkness,
It is enough, since I know,
That though I may stubmle in my going,
Thou dost not fall.

Artist commentary:

James Dever: (SoundCloud description, excerpt)

Written in 2014, The Fall only recently was premiered in April of 2016.

The Fall is written for a women's choir in four parts (divisi, eight lines) and utilizes and old Scottish Gaelic poem.

James Dever: (YouTube description, excerpt)

Premiere performance from April 28th, 2016 at UNC's Frasier Hall, conducted by the wonderful Will Ecker. A huge thank you goes out to him and this group of fantastic volunteers for supporting my music and senior recital!

The Fall is my first attempt at writing choral music. Back in late 2014 I was still in my first year of the composition program and working with Dr. Robert Ehle when the first idea of writing for voices came to me. My music performance experience has been almost entirely instrumental, and specifically rhythmical, so I wanted to challenge myself by writing for a completely different ensemble than I had in the past.

The text is from an old Gaelic hymn. When I first started working out ideas of how to set the text the idea of a rising line that encompasses an entire diatonic scale jumped out at me (that first passage can be heard at 1:47). From there, I decided that a closer knit group of voices would best be able to accomplish the smaller range of the piece which is why the piece eventually became for female voices.

The music of Ola Gjeilo, Morten Lauridsen, and Eric Whitacre played a key role in the composition because of their music being the first choral music I really bonded with. The idea of the close intervals and clusters was not inspired entirely by their music, however, and I definitely credit the first ideas I found for this piece to the opening material of Richard Strauss' Eine Alpensinfonie.

I hope you enjoy!