What film is the song that uses a chorus of women's voices by the composer who was inspired by Walt Whitman intended for?
Vaughan Williams' program note for A Sea Symphony discusses how the text was to be treated as music. The composer writes, "The plan of the work is symphonic rather than narrative or dramatic, and this may be held to justify the frequent repetition of important words and phrases which occur in the poem. The words as well as the music are thus treated symphonically." Walt Whitman's poems inspired him to write the symphony, and Whitman's use of free verse became appreciated at a time where fluidity of structure was becoming more attractive than traditional, metrical settings of text. This fluidity helped facilitate the non-narrative, symphonic treatment of text that Vaughan Williams had in mind. In the third movement in particular, the text is loosely descriptive and can be "pushed about by the music", some lines being repeated, some not consecutive in the written text immediately following one another in the music, and some left out entirely.Vaughan Williams was not the only composer following a non-narrative approach to his text. Mahler took a similar, perhaps even more radical approach in his Eighth Symphony, presenting many lines of the first part, "Veni, Creator Spiritus", in what music writer and critic Michael Steinberg referred to as "an incredibly dense growth of repetitions, combinations, inversions, transpositions and conflations". He does the same with Goethe's text in Part Two of the symphony, making two substantial cuts and other changes.Other works take the use of text as music still further. Vaughan Williams uses a chorus of women's voices wordlessly in his Sinfonia Antartica, based on his music for the film Scott of the Antarctic, to help set the bleakness of the overall atmosphere. While a chorus is used in the second and third movements of Glass's Seventh Symphony, also known as A Toltec Symphony, the text contains no actual words; the composer states that it is instead formed "from loose syllables that add to the evocative context of the overall orchestral texture".
Scott of the Antarctic