Night Vision
Grade: Professional
Duration: 11:00
Composed: Dec. 2009 - Jan. 2010 in New York City and Los Angeles
For String Quartet and Baritone - full set includes score, string parts, and piano reduction (for rehearsal).
Full Set: $100 (Includes Vocal Score and String Parts) . Additional Full Score: $25
A Piano-accompaniment version is also available for purchase.
Set of Two Vocal Scores: $50
Performance by John Torres in 2010 in New York City.
Text: Walt Whitman's On the Beach at Night
On the beach, at night,
Stands a child, with her father,
Watching the east, the autumn sky.
Up through the darkness,
While ravening clouds, the burial clouds, in black masses spreading,
Lower, sullen and fast, athwart and down the sky,
Amid a transparent clear belt of ether yet left in the east,
Ascends, large and calm, the lord-star Jupiter;
And nigh at hand, only a very little above,
Swim the delicate sisters, the Pleiades.
From the beach, the child, holding the hand of her father,
Those burial-clouds that lower, victorious, soon to devour all,
Watching, silently weeps.
Weep not, child,
Weep not, my darling,
With these kisses let me remove your tears;
The ravening clouds shall not long be victorious,
They shall not long possess the sky,
Jupiter shall emerge, be patient, watch again another night, the Pleiades shall emerge,
They are immortal, all those stars, both silvery and golden, shall shine out again,
The great stars and the little ones shall shine out again, they
endure;
Then, dearest child, mournest thou only for Jupiter?
Considerest thou alone the burial of the stars?
Something there is,
Something there is more immortal even than the stars,
Something that shall endure longer even than lustrous Jupiter,
Longer than sun, or any revolving satellite,
Or the radiant sisters, the Pleiades.
-Walt Whitman