Program Note:

Walt Whitman's evocative and timeless text often suggests water imagery, with its descending rivulets, drifting currents and waves reflected in this music's textures, harmony and rhythms. While mostly a calm traversal of America, the “currents” build toward “the storm’s abysmic waves, …Raging over the vast,…” before ending with gently lapping waves gradually disappearing..."Wash'd on America's shores."

David Dzubay
June 2022

Sea of Time is largely contained within Autumn Rivulets, a work from 2019 jointly commissioned by the Quad City Symphony Orchestra and its music director Mark Russell Smith and the Indiana University School of Music in celebration of Walt Whitman’s 200th birthday in 2019 and of the bicentennial of the founding of Indiana University in 2020. Autumn Rivulets is a longer work and includes texts by Dylan Thomas and a number of other writers, while Sea of Time presents the Whitman text exclusively.

TEXT
Walt Whitman (1819-1892)
Leaves of Grass
Book XXIV: Autumn Rivulets
As Consequent, Etc. (1881)

As consequent from store of summer rains,
Or wayward rivulets in autumn flowing,
Or many a herb-lined brook’s reticulations,
Or subterranean sea-rills making for the sea,
Songs of continued years I sing.

Life’s ever-modern rapids first, (soon, soon to blend,
With the old streams of death.)

Some threading Ohio’s farm-felds or the woods,
Some down Colorado’s cañons from sources of perpetual snow,
Some half-hid in Oregon, or away southward in Texas,
Some in the north winding their way to Erie, Niagara, Ottawa,
Some to Atlantica’s bays, and so to the great salt brine.

[In you whoe’er you are my book perusing,]
In I myself, in all the world, these currents flowing,
All, all toward the mystic ocean tending.

Currents for starting a continent new,
Overtures sent to the solid out of the liquid,
Fusion of ocean and land, tender and pensive waves,
(Not safe and peaceful only, waves rous’d and ominous too,
Out of the depths the storm’s abysmic waves, who knows whence?
Raging over the vast, with many a broken spar and tatter’d sail.)

Or from the sea of Time, collecting vasting all, I bring,
A windrow-drift of weeds and shells.

O little shells, so curious-convolute, so limpid-cold and voiceless,
Will you not little shells to the tympans of temples held,
Murmurs and echoes still call up, eternity’s music faint and far,
Wafted inland, sent from Atlantica’s rim, strains for the soul of the prairies,
Whisper’d reverberations, chords for the ear of the West joyously sounding,
Your tidings old, yet ever new and untranslatable,
Infinitesimals out of my life, and many a life,
(For not my life and years alone I give—all, all I give,)
These waifs from the deep, cast high and dry,
Wash’d on America’s shores?