dying is fine)but Death - (2007)

E. E. Cummings

for medium voice and piano

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This text remains under copyright and is therefore not fully reproduced herein.

 

dying is fine)but Death

?o
baby
i

wouldn't like

Death if Death
were
good:for........

[ 3 pages, circa 1' 50" ]

 

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E. E. Cummings

 

Cummings offers us saucy comparison between dying and death, wherein he -- and we by extension -- thank "god / almighty for dying / (forgive us,o life!the sin of Death." In the modern clash between secularism, atheism and religious sensibilities, this modern poet might spell "god" in the lower case, but the concept of God remains for him, even in the parlance of Daniel Dennett, a "useful fiction" at the very minimum. It is not religion, but the artificiality of the business and science of "death" and the legalism which surround it which Cummings unabashedly calls "sin" and "evil."

 

 

The contrast between a light swing tempo and rhythm and this text sets up the poet's clearly-voiced insistence that indeed dying and death are two completely different concepts, celebrated differently in our various cultures.

 

 

For this distinction, the swing tempo and minor tonality tinged with chromaticism give way in a parade of rising seconds in sixteenth notes, and is broken into a regular insistence of parallel triadic block harmonies to accompany the harder "scientific and artificial and evil and legal" game which is death in this modern world.

 

 

At the close of this setting, there is a repetition of the cry to life and de facto then to "dying" as well, "forgive us" for the sin of death.

 

 

This score will be published in in Fifty-Five Songs, YR1550, in the coming months available from Yelton Rhodes Music, Los Angeles, California