Three Songs

About

"The three poems here set have always seemed to me to share some ambient and most poignant awareness of our experience on these islands, whether of small remote sounds in summer, the desolation of a crippled gull, or the brilliance of summer harvesting, or whatever might make us feel at home" -Douglas Lilburn

Lilburn found an underlying experiential similarity in these poems by Ruth Dallas (Nos. 1 and 2) and Basil Dowling (No. 3), which he drew the fore in his settings. The keyboard introduction of "Clear Sky" captures the play of expansiveness (in the broad registral reach) and homeliness (the repeated motifs) that characterises the set as a whole. In "The Picnic" the spacious quality of the keyboard, evoking the circling swallows in their easy flight, is tinged by a haunting iambic limp. Lilburn's word painting here is poignant and ironic: vocal melismas depict the crumpled, curled foot of the one-footed gull, and our (short) memories of his sorry sight. "Summer Afternoon" sums up the ambivalent mood of the set. The declamatory voice (also found in "The Picnic") gradually becomes more lyrical, and a sense of progress is conveyed through the rising vocal line (as in "Clear Sky"). Yet there is a lingering sadness. The keyboard's recurrent fluttering seventh and off-beat falling fourth recalls the desolation and troubling limp of "The Picnic".
(Note by Nancy November).