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WE SHALL NOT SLEEP

Holt, Christopher William

Abstract Details

2007, Master of Music (MM), Bowling Green State University, Music Composition.
We Shall Not Sleep is a seventeen-minute piece for choir, seven vocal soloists, brass quintet, and percussion. The title istaken from the poem, “In Flanders Fields”, by John McCrae1. This poem is the central text of the work, flanked on either sideby information found in Canadian attestation papers and soldiers’ death records from World War I. My goal is to create amusical memorial using the poem as a centerpiece to two perspectives: that of the soldiers’ and their families’. The attestation papers give information on men enlisted in the 43rd Battalion of Winnipeg, Manitoba who were killed on October 26, 1917 during the Battle of Passchendaele. I chose this particular battalion and battle because my great-grandfather served in the 43rd and was injured on that day. Three soloists portraying soldiers present this unusual choice of text “answering” to quasi-mechanical ground bass “questions” sung by another male soloist. While these pseudo-recitatives come to a close, the choir emerges with the poem. By design, these texts overlap. I have manipulated the words in such a way to suggest double meanings both sincere and cynical in nature. After the poem reaches its climax, the fate of the soldiers is realized through dialogue similar to the text of the attestation papers, only here the words are drawn from the soldiers’ death records. Three female soloists, responding to a new,more ethereal quasi-ground bass, present details of the soldiers’ deaths. Since most of the battalion was either Scottish or of Scottish descent, I have incorporated elements of Scottish folkmusic. I have also used the two marches associated with this particular battalion to generate melodic and motivic ideas. Given the character of the texts, the inclusion of instrumentation such as brass and percussion is appropriate. However, thissupporting instrumentation has been applied sparsely as to not overpower the other elements. The brass quintet is the primary accompaniment, while the percussion only appears at appropriate moments in the text.
Marilyn Shrude (Advisor)
73 p.

Recommended Citations

Citations

  • Holt, C. W. (2007). WE SHALL NOT SLEEP [Master's thesis, Bowling Green State University]. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=bgsu1174410017

    APA Style (7th edition)

  • Holt, Christopher. WE SHALL NOT SLEEP. 2007. Bowling Green State University, Master's thesis. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center, http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=bgsu1174410017.

    MLA Style (8th edition)

  • Holt, Christopher. "WE SHALL NOT SLEEP." Master's thesis, Bowling Green State University, 2007. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=bgsu1174410017

    Chicago Manual of Style (17th edition)