Full Moon

for SATB choir

 

Instrumentation: SATB choir
Duration:
4:30

Full Moon is a setting of a poem of the same name by William Carlos Williams. While the text is brief, Williams’s words convey vivid contrasts between darkness and light, coldness and warmth, proximity and distance, and the observed and the envisioned. These contrasts are explored musically over the course of the piece through variations in loudness, tonality, texture and color.

Full Moon (1924)
by William Carlos Williams

Blessed moon
noon
of night  

that through the dark
bids Love
stay—

curious shapes
awake
to plague me

Is day near shining girl?
Yes day!

the warm
the radiant
all fulfilling

day.