A Garret of Old Playthings (Carl Sandburg)
soprano, piano
SEA-028-00 - $12.00 - M6 minutes Honorable Mention, Diana Barnhart American Song Competition
Second Prize, National Federation of Music Clubs Devora Nadworney Award
I wrote these five Sandburg songs for my friend Janet Youngdahl in 1982, when we were both undergraduates at The College of Wooster. The set is framed by two reminiscences, Upstairs and I Sang, with the shadowy accompaniment texture reflecting the blurred outlines of memory. The middle song, Changing Light Winds, layers the soprano's linear serenity over the piano's restless waves of sound. Sandburg's wry wit is evident in God is No Gentleman and Spring Grass, which are as mischievous and irregular musically as they are poetically.
Soprano range: d'-a"
Upstairs
I too have a garret of old playthings.
I have tin soldiers with broken arms upstairs.
I have wagons with the wheels gone upstairs.
I have guns and a drum, and a jumping jack and a magic lantern. And dust is on them, and I never look at them upstairs. I too have a garret of old playthings.
God is No Gentleman
God gets up in the morning and says, "Another day?"
God goes to work every day at regular hours.
God is no gentleman, for God puts on overalls and gets dirty running the universe we know about and several other universes nobody knows about but Him.
Changing Light Winds
Changing light winds
blew over the sea,
came blue, came gold,
came silver with spray,
came white in dreamsnow
with long foam feathers,
long sleepy snowfalls,
then gray over the flats
an overcast of monotone--
night and stars a while
then night and no stars.
Spring Grass
Spring grass, there is a dance to be danced for you.
Come up, spring grass, if only for young feet.
Come up, spring grass, young feet ask you.
Smell of the young spring grass,
You're a mascot riding on the wind horses.
You came to my nose and spiffed me.
This is your lucky year.
Young spring grass just after the winter,
Shoots of the big green whisper of the year,
Come up, if only for young feet.
Come up, young feet ask you.
I Sang
I sang to you and the moon
But only the moon remembers.
I sang
O reckless free_hearted free_throated rhythms,
Even the moon remembers them and is kind to me.
"Upstairs" from Cornhuskers by Carl Sandburg; copyright 1918 by Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Inc., copyright 1946 by Carl Sandburg, by permission of Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc. "Changing Light Winds" from The Complete Poems of Carl Sandburg; renewed 1978 by Margaret Sandburg, Helga Sandburg Crile and Janet Sandburg, by permission of Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc. "Spring Grass" from Good Morning, America, copyright 1928, 1956 by Carl Sandburg by permission of Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc. "I Sang" from Chicago Poems by Carl Sandburg; copyright 1916 by Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Inc. Copyright 1944 by Carl Sandburg, by permission of Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc. "God Is No Gentleman" from Honey and Salt; copyright 1963 by Carl Sandburg, by permission of Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc.