Sunward

SATB, piano | Duration c. 3'30"

Sunward is a setting of Nina Salaman’s poem The Sunflower and the Sun, commissioned by Dr. Erin Colwitz and the Northern Michigan University Arts Chorale for their 2019-2020 eason. My initial drafts of this piece were very simple and lyrical, focused on a pentatonic melody in G♭ Major presented both in unison and in canon as the work progressed. The longer I lived with the text, however, the more frustrated I became with the implied patriarchal language contained therein - specifically the reference to the sunflower as being feminine and “in her place beneath” the masculine sun. This literary trope is not unique to Nina Salaman’s writing, of course - many of her early 20th century contemporaries (including Rabindranath Tagore, whose poetry I have worked with extensively) used similar language, particularly when characterizing the relationship between God and humanity as a classic male-female power dynamic.

In the end I decided to keep the same pentatonic melody, but by placing it in the relative minor of E♭ and employing less rigid counterpoint, the atmosphere became far darker and more melancholy. The piece shifts in character dramatically upon reaching the fourth line; “So stands she radiant.” This shift is meant to be in defiance of the gender dynamic that subtly implied in the poem, as well as to speak to issues of gender inequality that still exist today, over one hundred years since the poem’s original publication date.

So is the sunflower wedded to the sun,
Grown from great love to likeness; grown to burn
With golden splendour from her place beneath;
So stands she radiant, lifting eyes that turn
A lifelong gaze to him, till life be done
And she falls sunward, worshipping in death.

- Nina Salaman