instrumentation: SATB voices w/ divisi

year composed: 2024 | 6 minutes

co-composed with Eli Philip Hocking

Guillaume Apollinaire was a French-Polish writer and art critic who lived from 1880 to 1918. He spent most of his life in Paris where he made significant contributions to the fine arts, coining the terms “surrealism” and “cubism,” as well as “calligramme.” Apollinaire wrote nearly 30 calligrammes, which are poems whose words comprise an image or pattern and which he describes as “an idealisation of free verse poetry and typographical precision.” One of Apollinaire’s calligrammes, “La mandoline, l‘oeillet et le bambou”, is the text source for this piece.
 

We chose to set only the portion of the poem that forms a mandolin. Its original French text, accompanied by Eli’s English translation, is below:

 

Ô batailles, la terre tremble comme une mandoline Comme la balle à travers le corps
Le son traverse la vérité
Car la raison c’est ton art, femme
 

O war, the earth shakes like a mandolin
Like the bullet through a body,
the sound calls to mind the truth
because reason is your art, woman

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To understand this poem, it’s important to know that Apollinaire was injured while serving in the First World War and never fully recovered, passing away two years later. He examines the evil and absurdity of war in his poetry, reflecting on its power to desensitize and dehumanize people, as well as his friends who died or went missing in battle. During the First World War, it was not uncommon for soldiers to carry with them mandolins, lightweight instruments that could be played in the trenches. In playing music, soldiers were able to bring humanity to an otherwise violent and haunting environment. “La Mandoline” is a meditation on the idea that music and art are humanizing forces, even in the bleakest of times.