A Burnt Ship, for SATB chorus, contains a setting of an epigram by the 17th-century English poet John Donne, in which the men aboard a besieged ship must face the grisly choice between a death by burning or by drowning—the irony being that those who “leap forth” (opting to drown) are set afire by their nearby enemies, while those who remain on the ship (opting to burn) will drown as it sinks. Thus, the poem’s two deaths, seemingly opposites, are closely intertwined. Musically, I have chosen to represent each with a particular harmonic signature—“drowning” with the whole-tone scale; “burning” with the hexatonic scale (another six-note collection, consisting of alternating semitones and minor thirds). These harmonic “leitmotifs” present two rather distinct soundscapes, but are closely related from a theoretical standpoint. A Burnt Ship was written in 2015 at the Choral Chameleon Summer Institute in New York City, and premiered there by Choral Chameleon with conductor Matthew Oltman.
Recording: vocalists of the Jacobs School of Music; Steven Berlanga, conductor (Bloomington, Indiana, 2016)
A Burnt Ship
Out of a fired ship, which by no way
But drowning could be rescued from the flame,
Some men leap’d forth, and ever as they came
Near the foes’ ships, did by their shot decay;
So all were lost, which in the ship were found,
They in the sea being burnt, they in the burnt ship drown’d.
John Donne (1572–1631)