This Boyhood’s End was mine too, but through its music’s dance, not just Hudson’s farewell to a natural world of exotic flowers and flocks of birds on the great plains of the pampas.
In Tippett’s suite of songs I first found that ecstasy of word-rhythm wedded to melodic contour held in place by a singer’s voice, and a pianist’s touch of harmony grafted from a play of parts.
Sitting on my bedroom floor ear close to the gramophone, thirteen and already enamored, I listened over and again to this cantata that has for so long held the key to the very door of music . . .
Music may be a notion like ‘God’ or ‘love’. Everyone identifies with it, but it is composers who live to fathom its depths and sound out its mystery.
This is a poem about listening to Michael Tippett's vocal cantata Boyhood's End, words by W.H.Hudson from his book Far Away and Long Ago. Catch it here for seven days: