Joyce Suskind (1928-2017)
Meditations on War And Peace
Year: 2008
Duration (in minutes): 20 minutes
Difficulty: High (professional)
Publisher: American Composers Alliance
Description: This suite of five songs is written to the lyrics of three poets,
William Butler Yeats, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and Morgan Alexander.
Each song contains lyric and musical elements representing both war and peace.The Second Coming, by Yeats, one of the most famous poems in the English language,inspired the final song."And what rough beast...slouches toward Bethlehem to be born","is set to a...march-like rhythm which, paradoxically moves into the realm of great art by being uplifting rather than depressing or alarming." New Music Connoisseur Barry L. Cohen