Program - Krannert Center for the Performing Arts

what do all you ridiculous things want? Oh that’s the sort of animal you are; well, you’ve come tothe wrong place.’”“Impressions on the March” is a Mahlerian funeral march, with major/minor mode mixture and bitonality.Scott’s sympathy for the animals surfaces again, as it does throughout his writings and inthese songs. “The dogs are…tired to-night. Pathetic to see the ponies floundering” is set in laboredrhythms. The tempo increases slightly as Scott records his observations about the sights and soundson the march, before describing “the eternal silence of the great white desert.”“In Winter Quarters” finds Scott learning of Roald Amundsen’s attempts to precede him to the Pole,and here, and throughout these songs, his fears are quickly replaced by a strong sense of duty. Acontrasting “B” section sets Scott’s description of his fearless men in heroic terms, the brass anddrum music providing an exuberant respite from the increasingly dark circumstances of the doomedexpedition. Despite this moment of optimism, the hymns of the Morning Service, depicted in anoriginal chorale, “are not quite successful,” as Scott reflects on the fragility and insignificance of manin the cosmos. To describe the increasing contrast between their aspirations and increasinglydifficult circumstances, the score’s opening pages contain music in different tempos simultaneously:bassoons and marimba travel faster than the more lugubrious oboe when it enters with its solo.“Summit, the Pole and Beyond” is the final song and carries the cycle’s greatest burden of storytelling.Scott, always so sensitive to his animals, is forced to kill the ponies for food, discoversAmundsen’s tent at the Pole, describes the death of two of his companions and muses on his wifeand son during his last moments. The various musical anomalies and uncomfortable key and tempojuxtapositions that characterize the fourth and fifth songs are intensified in the sixth, as musicalreminiscences from all but one of the songs are heard. The last pages of the score aspire to a steelyand unsentimental beauty, with a simple repeated chord and a tolling of bells. It represents the wayI imagine Scott in his last hours, courageous to the last, accepting his fate. A calm settles over him,and he does not regret the fearful journey. “We took risks,” he writes in his “Message to the Public”in those last hours, “we knew we took them; things have come out against us, and therefore we haveno cause for complaint, but bow to the will of Providence, determined still to do our best to the last.”The composition of Should This Be Found took seven months and was completed on 29 December,2004. The parts were completed on January 17, 2005, 93 years to the day after Robert Falcon Scottand his men reached the South Pole. The work is dedicated to Sergeant First Class MaryKayMessenger, soprano, Colonel Thomas Rotondi, Jr., conductor, and the United States MilitaryAcademy Band at West Point.I am also pleased that this performance at the University of Illinois is a “homecoming” of sorts forme and for the arranger of the text, Richard Powers. For me, because I received my bachelor’s and