Full Many A Glorious Morning

When Karen Thomas, Artistic Director of Seattle Pro Musica, asked me to compose a piece for their women’s choir, she asked that the piece be set to a Shakespeare text. I chose to set Shakespeare’s Sonnet 33, Full Many A Glorious Morning, because of its beautiful descriptions of nature, love, and loss. Besides it’s wonderful text painting of the sun, mountains and clouds, one interpretation can be seen - the sun represents that of a loved one, and the cloud represents the loss of this loved one. I personally related to experiencing that loss through sudden death, so I set the text with this interpretation.

As one experiences the joy of another, Shakespeare depicts this through the sun shining “with all triumphant splendor on my brow.” Then, he says, “But out, alack, he was but one hour mine; The region cloud hath mask’d him from me now,” he shows how quickly this person can be snatched away from us, in death’s unrelenting grip.

By musically expressing the colors I associate with the text, I chose the key of E Major, which is a bright orange, to represent the glorious color of the sun, with upward scalar motives in their ascent to climactic moments of its “triumphant splendor.” I used minor modes and descending scalar motives to depict duller colors of the “basest clouds.” I then repeated the first lines of the Sonnet to end on a hopeful note, coloring it with a shimmery B Lydian inflection on “heaven’s sun,” depicting hints of blue, purple, white and gold.