Mystic Trumpeter – Carol Barnett

This is a hand-copied manuscript.

Composer: Carol Barnett

Text by: Walt Whitman

Instrumentation: SSAATTBB, trumpet

Duration: c: 12'

Date Written:  1997

Commissioned: for the Dale Warland Singers 25th Anniversary with funds provided  by Meet the Composer and the Readers Digest Consortium Commission. Members of the consortium included the Gregg Smith Singers; the Ars Nova Singers, Tom Morgan, conductor; and the New Classic Singers, Lee Kesselman, conductor

Composer’s note: 

I never really appreciated Walt Whitman’s poetry – too much O this and O that. And yet, I am occasionally captivated by its evocative, incantatory quality, and in 1997 found myself setting a rather large chunk of The Mystic Trumpeter, happy to find so many opportunities for word painting, which I love to do.  More than that, I tried to capture the poetic spirit of Whitman himself: a big, bold American Romantic who loved the voluptuous sound of words and whose poetry rumbles on at length through whole lists of subjects.  Consequently, the music is not all that refined; it takes what it needs from various styles and tosses them all together, going from one to anther quickly, without graceful transitions.  It is not only a setting of the poetry, but a portrait of the poet.