Title: Evidence of Things Not Seen
Description: In plotting the format of the present work, composed mostly in 1997, I chose 36 texts by 24 authors. Wystan Auden, Paul Goodman (a childhood idol), and Walt Whitman, all of whom I had used dozens of times before, are here represented by five, four, and three poems each. William Penn, who, as we Quakers say, speaks to my condition, is represented by two prose selections, as are Stephen Crane and the eighteenth-century hymnodist Thomas Ken. The other eighteen authors provide one song each. The sendoff by Roethke, "From Whence Cometh Song," I used once before in another version, and would not have set it again, but no other poem seemed more apt. The verses of Wordsworth, Browning, and Elizabeth Barrett, though world famous, are new to my pen. Edna Millay, another childhood idol, remains close to my heart. Like Penn, John Woolman was a Quaker thinker whose prose dates from the early 1700s; his pacifism, like that of the more ironic Langston Hughes, contrasts with the sometimes warlike Kipling. Kipling's contemporary countrymen, Oscar Wilde and A. E. Housman, with their Victorian poignancy, contrast in turn with the American poignancy of the very late Jane Kenyon. The prose passages from the French of Colette and of Julien Green are, in my translation, the final paragraphs respectively of their semi-autobiographical works, L'autre sommeil and L'Etoile vesper. Robert Frost, along with Dickinson and Whitman, is probably the American poet most often used by musicians; his elegiac "Come In" fits perfectly here. So does Baudelaire's English verse, and that of Yeats, which is arranged for trio. Mark Doty's weighty harangue, "Faith," from his Atlantis, specifically concerns the tragedy of AIDS, as does the penultimate song, drawn from the late Paul Monette's Love Alone. Two of the songs, Green's "He Thinks Upon His Death" and Goodman's "Boy with a Baseball Glove," were composed 45 years ago, and have waited all this time to find a home. (In 1984, I did reshape the Goodman song, minus the words, into the third movement of a Violin Concerto.) Mark Doty still thrives in Provincetown. I have personally known six of them, though none, I think, have known each other; the interrelationship depends solely on my whimsical juxtapositions, as does their continuity within the cycle. The order of songs relies on subject matter. The opening group, Beginnings, is just that--songs about moving forward, and the wistful optimism of love, with a concluding hymn-text from the eighteenth century to be sung by a congregation in the morning. (Although an atheist, I am sincere in my dozens of settings of so-called sacred texts; I do believe in Belief, and in the great art, starting with the Psalms of David, that has sprung from religious conviction.) The second group, Middles, about coming of age, horror of war, romantic disappointment, concludes with another hymn, this one for evening. The last group, Ends, about death, concludes with an admonishment from William Penn, echoing a definition of Faith in Corinthians II: Look not to things that are seen, but to that which is unseen; for things that are seen pass away, but that which is unseen is forever. - Composer's note.

In January 1997, the New York Festival of Song, with support from the Library of Congress, gave the premïre of Rorem's Evidence of Things Not Seen, a set of 36 poems by 24 authors. The work is arranged in three large segments: 'Beginnings', the first, includes songs about moving forward and the 'wistful optimism of love'; 'Middles', the second, touches on coming of age and the horrors of war; 'Ends' treats issues of death, inspired, in part, by friends of the composer stricken by AIDS. - Oxford Grove Music Online https://doi.org/10.1093/gmo/9781561592630.article.48611