Valediction – Carol Barnett

Composer: Carol Barnett Text by: John Donne Instrumentation: TTBB, cello, piano Duration: c: 8' Date Written:  1989 Commissioned: for the Twin Cities Men’s Chorus with funds provided by the Friends of the Twin Cities Men’s Chorus. Composer’s note:  This setting of John Donne’s A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning was written for the Twin Cities’ Men’s Chorus during the early years of the AIDS epidemic that deeply affected our arts community. Although Donne wrote the poem in the early 17th century for his wife Ann on the eve of a trip to the Continent, it could easily be read as a final farewell to a dear friend or lover lost to the plague. The poem’s main conceit is the idea of two lovers as two legs of a drafting compass; although they move apart at times, they are always connected, and the stationary leg brings the circling one back to where it began. As I studied the poem, I was intrigued with the way the sentence structure spilled past its iambic tetrametric borders. And I loved how