JOHN LIBERATORE
composer

Text for Hold Back Thy Hours comes primarily from Thomas Percy’s "Reliques of Ancient English Poetry," published in 1765.  The chosen texts are tiny fragments of a massive anthology; the three-volume codex contains hundreds of English ballads and popular song texts from the Middle Ages to the late Renaissance.  Since many items in Percy’s catalogue were first disseminated through oral tradition, the texts have existed in many different manifestations.  The text for the latter two songs of Hold Back Thy Hours comes from the Jacobean playwright John Fletcher, but while Fletcher’s works were published first, much of his prose can be traced back to the popular songs and ballads compiled in Percy’s anthology.  

 

Between the various texts of Percy’s Reliques.  Common threads emerge: lost love, solace, madness, the gruesomeness of battle, and the inevitable passage of time.  With this ancient text, I found myself borrowing from consciously and unconsciously from Baroque musical idioms, maybe hinting at the style of Purcell.  I am particularly interested in musical situations that interweave, rather than juxtapose, disparate musical styles.  The work’s dedicatee, tenor Zach Finklestein, is a specialist in English Baroque music, so it seemed a natural direction for the work to take.

 

 

 

Till slumber hath quieted me,

                  In sorrow I sigh and weep;

The clouds are my canopy

                  To cover me while I sleep.

 

-Anonymous: from an English Mad Song published in Percy’s Reliques

 

 

Gentle river, gentle river,

                  Lo, thy streams are stain’d with gore,

Many a brave and noble captain

                  Floats along thy willow’d shore.

 

-Anonymous: from Gentle River, Gentle River, published in Percy’s Reliques

 

 

Weep no more, nor sigh, nor groan,

                  Sorrow calls no time that’s gone;

Violets pluck’d the sweetest rain

                  Makes not fresh nor grow again.

 

-John Fletcher, The Queen of Corinth

 

Hold back thy hours, dark Night, till we have done;

                  The Day will come too soon.

 

-John Fletcher, The Maid’s Tragedy