The closest we should ever get to a choir is The Oh Hellos. Popular music is about what’s at Bonnaroo and Coachella it’s about backbeats and the like. Somebody in our little circle told me it was originally a choral piece, and I went hunting for a recording. Still, even with me harrumphing my way through half notes, the ethos of the piece shone through. We were learning to be adult musicians, figuring out how to listen to one another and work as a creative team. Our first few run-throughs-frankly, many of our run-throughs-were impressively bad. Euphonium in my lap, I sat in the back of the capacious college band room hung with orange acoustic treatments like failed modern art. The first time I heard it, of course, it wasn’t even the choral setting. It doesn’t matter how many times I listen to it the descending pattern of secundal suspensions and resolutions always raises goosebumps. The result defies the psychology of overplaying. The task seems almost ludicrous in its immensity now, but Silvestri turned out something (the next day!) that not only was appreciably Frostian, but also stood on its own: Undaunted, Whitacre contacted a poet friend, Charles Anthony Silvestri, to craft a poem correspondent to the meter and rhythm of Frost’s seminal work. For whatever reason though, the estate had then either closed or failed to renew the copyright. Other people had written settings of the work and, on his website, Whitacre admits to following a natural assumption that the poem was open for anyone’s use. It started out as a setting of Robert Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.” One of the most recognizable American poems-and arguably one of the best-the four-stanza work was, according to Whitacre, part of an earlier, surprise release of copyrights from the Frost estate. “Sleep” though, at least for me, was transcendent. “Ghost Train” sounded exactly how one might imagine a piece with that title to sound, full of rhythmic, driving cluster chords and ethereal whistles. Sometime early in my college years, our professor and band director trotted out a couple of Whitacre pieces called “Ghost Train” and “Sleep.” Both leaned well into program music, that sort of instrumental composition that conveys a more definitive narrative structure.
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