Program Note

As the child of an author, I received a great deal of encouragement to dive into all manner of literature as a child. The earliest poem I remember memorizing was Lewis Carroll’s (Charles Ludwidge Dodgson’s) Jabberwocky. A love for all things playful, fantastic, and nonsensical has stayed with me ever since. When Joshua Glassman, then director of the University of Pennsylvania Glee Club, mentioned his interest in settings of Lewis Carroll’s texts, I jumped at the opportunity. The setting of Jabberwocky moves alternately between hazy, sporadic textures and heroic, Mendelssohn-ian ones, just as the poem moves mediates freely between sense and nonsense. The second poem, The Walrus and the Carpenter, presents the difficulty of setting a lengthy, sing-song text. While mostly strophic, I imposed upon myself the challenge of creating as many unexpected “deceptive” cadences as I could, balancing a sense of buoyancy with a certain uneasiness. Finally, The Lobster Quadrille serves as a brief dessert, almost frivolous, a final invitation to enter into the (sometimes more sensical) nonsencial realm.

The first and last movements were premiered on May 15, 2018, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania by the University of Pennsylvania Glee Club, directed by Joshua Glassman.

— Douglas Buchanan

Audio

In the Golden Afternoon - Jabberwocky

In the Golden Afternoon - The Lobster Quadrille

Video

In the Golden Afternoon: I. Jabberwocky
The University of Pennsylvania Glee Club, under the direction of Joshua Glassman, premieres Douglas Buchanan's "In the Golden Afternoon: Three Songs of Lewis Carroll," movement I., Jabberwocky.