Excerpt: A Restless Slumber

♝

The following is an excerpt from the ongoing series “A Restless Slumber.”

On June 11, 2000 the building below inexplicably burned to the ground. It was the day after the first and last public performance of my music.

The building was on the campus of St Michael’s College in Colchester, Vermont, a school founded by the Society of Saint Edmund after they fled persecution in France in the late 1890’s. The crown jewel of the program was to be a song cycle of Yeats poems I had set for soprano and piano.

An hour before the concert the Edmundites forbade the performance of the Yeats cycle on the grounds that Yeats was a high-ranking member of the Golden Dawn, the esoteric order founded by Aleister Crowley. The song cycle ‘This is my Letter to the World’ — for which I set poetry by Emily Dickinson — was substituted. A recording of the concert survived, which I’ve uploaded to SoundCloud here: bit.ly/1943fxM

But never in my life had I seen a photo of that building until I awoke this morning to find this image on my iPhone. ♞