Tom Myron (American, b. 1959 Troy, New York)
PROGRAM NOTE

The Soldier's Return
For String Quartet
Duration: approx. 25 minutes

When, in January of 2001, the members of the DaPonte String Quartet approached me about writing a work for them, I turned to William Walker's Southern Harmony and Musical Companion (1835) with the idea of using one or more of its hymns as a basis for the new quartet. I was particularly interested in Walker's collection because, unlike many other shape-note hymn collections, the music in The Southern Harmony has remained unaltered (un-retouched, if you will) throughout its long history of reprints. Right away the hymn The Soldier's Return jumped off the page at me. I found the over-all structure of the music highly appealing. The hymn consists of three 5-bar phrases. The first phrase is repeated, making a total of 20 bars of music. In the third bar of each phrase the music doubles back on itself, almost to the point of being a palindrome. The feeling of mirror symmetry is further heightened by the fact that the two treble parts move in near-constant contrary motion. This pervasive symmetry, coupled with the uniform length of the phrases, gives the hymn a feeling of monumental solidity and grounded-ness. Hearing it is like looking at a row of plain carved granite arches.

The shape of the melodic line is also intriguing. The fact that it contains leaps of sixths and sevenths (in places contiguous) struck me as unusual for a shape-note hymn. Though perfectly sing-able, the line seems to possess an 'instrumental' quality. On impulse I transposed it into the key of D and scored it for violin, adding double stops based mostly around adjacent open strings. The delightful result was a very authentic sounding fiddle tune.

Needless to say, this turned out to be no coincidence. Like so much of the music in The Southern Harmony, The Soldier's Return has origins of considerable antiquity. George Pullen Jackson first noticed the tune in his White Spirituals of the Southern Uplands (1933). In that book he noted that the tune has a Scotch or Irish flavor and he listed it in his section on fiddle tunes. He revisited the tune in his Spiritual-Folksongs of Early America (1937). In that book he calls it a 'Folk Hymn' and says that it was borrowed from Robert Burns' collection When the Wild War's Deadly Blast, which was widely used in the British Isles during the 18th century.

Individual movements of my quartet take the form of virtuoso square dances, lyrical ballads, atmospheric waltz fragments, a Beethoven-esque parody of 18th century quartet writing, a funeral march and a battle scene. The concluding Fantasia consists of a series of linked episodes that culminate in a restatement of the opening hymn transcription. On a dramatic or narrative level I hope that listeners come away from this work with the sense that there are many ways (and states of mind) in which a soldier might return from '…the wild war's deadly blast.'