For Bass Voice and Piano
Deep Sea Diver is the first of three songs for bass voice about the ocean depths. The second and third songs set poems by Walt Whitman and Rudyard Kipling respectively. These
songs are part of a larger project, a rhapsodic work for bass voice and orchestra, telling the story of the human experience exploring the deep oceans through the words of the remarkable explorer and biologist William Beebe (1877-1962).
Robert Francis (1901 – 1987) was an American poet and friend of Robert Frost. Indeed, Frost said of Francis that he was America’s ‘best neglected poet’. Francis produced just six collections of poetry, a novel and an autobiography of his early life. His poem Deep Sea Diver was inspired by William Beebe’s broadcast on national radio of one of his descents in the bathysphere off Nonesuch Island in the Bermudas. This Beebe recorded in his book Half Mile Down, from which the orchestral work takes its text. Beebe was well known to Francis through his many books recording his undersea exploration, notably his helmet diving adventures off the Galapagos Islands and Haiti.
Deep Sea Diver
Diver go down
Down through the green
Inverted dawn
To the dark unseen
To the never day
The under night
Starless and steep
Deep beneath deep
Diver fall
And falling fight
Your weed-dense way
Until you crawl
Until you touch
Weird water land
And stand.
Diver come up
Up through the green
Into the light
The sun the seen
But in the clutch
Of your dripping hand
Diver bring
Some uncouth thing
That we could swear
And would have sworn
Was never born
Or could ever be
Anywhere
Blaze on our sight
Make us see.
The music of this song makes use of the technique of interpolation of tonalities and chords. Two chord pairs are defined for each of the two parts of the poem describing descent and ascent:
The composer investigates the novel harmonies interpolation of these chords can produce in differing degrees of intensity. In addition some of these newly generated chords are further distorted in a process likened to passing a modulated sine wave through the material.
Tempo, expression, dynamics and articulation are marked carefully for the piano, but the vocal part is left free of detailed marking so inviting the soloist to define his own.
Downloads
Deep Sea Diver – score [pdf]
Deep Sea Diver – performance recording, by James Gower (bass voice) and Andrew Broome (piano) [mp3]