If Music Be the Food of Love

Program Notes

If Music Be the Food of Love was commissioned for Concentus Carolina (NC), Music Director Seth Garrepy, by Richard and Lynn Edmonds in memory of John Bavicchi, music professor for Mr. Edmonds, and composition teacher for the composer, at the Berklee College of Music. The piece was premiered on February 6, 2015, in Chapel Hill.

I feel it’s important to clarify the text that I used for If Music Be the Food of Love. The seven words compose first and foremost the opening to Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night. However, the text most familiar to music-lovers, that set famously by Henry Purcell and several composers of this day, was probably written about a half-century later, by a certain Colonel Henry Heveningham. It shares only the title line with the Shakespeare original; his is far darker and more pessimistic, and also much better poetry.

Thankfully, for me, the work for which I was commissioned was intended for a Shakespeare-themed program! With his penchant for dense imagery, The Bard is notoriously difficult to set to music. The text in discussion might appear to set up for a four- to five-minute work. Given the text, and the music, its due required a longer piece for me (8 minutes). I also added a solo upper-voice trio for more opportunities…

The trio opens and closes the work, focusing on glissando lines for “Play on” (as opposed to “Sing on” in the musically more familiar text) for the opening, and on vocalise to close the piece. The trio interrupts the larger chorus at several points throughout the bulk of the piece. Considering this, along with the largely contrapuntal material of the chorus, If Music contains quite a bit of polyphonic material (Hooray!). The climaxes are largely chordal. They are also often more dissonant. The words demand it. 

If Music Be the Food of Love
William Shakespeare

If music be the food of love, play on,
Give me excess of it that, surfeiting,
The appetite may sicken and so die.
That strain again, it had a dying fall.
O, it came o’er my ear like the sweet sound
That breathes upon a bank of violets,
Stealing and giving odour. Enough, no more,
’Tis not so sweet now as it was before.
O spirit of love, how quick and fresh art thou
That, notwithstanding thy capacity
Receiveth as the sea, naught enters there,
Of what validity and pitch so e’er,
But falls into abatement and low price
Even in a minute! So full of shapes is fancy
That it alone is high fantastical.