baritone and piano (1992)
Text by Marie Howe
duration: 5′
program note
“A Certain Light” is part of the original The Aids Quilt Songbook. The original 18 songs were published by Boosey and Hawkes in 1993. All profits from The AIDS Quilt Songbook score and CD are donated to The AIDS Resource Center and other related efforts. The premiere, on July 4th, 1992 in Alice Tully Hall, was sung by Will Parker.
I met Will Parker in 1991, when he asked me to contribute to the songbook. When I was looking for a text, a friend suggested I contact Marie Howe, whose brother has since died of AIDS. A whole cycle of poems written during his illness are contained in her book ‘What the Living Do,’ published by Norton in 1998, but the song was written earlier, when there were 5 or 6 poems. I asked her to read some of them to me, and chose ‘A Certain Light’ because of how she read it, and because of how she sounded reading her brother’s actual words. Marie first heard the song at the dress rehearsal for the concert at Alice Tully Hall. Will Parker originally intended to sing it, but he’d become weaker, and the others took over some of the songs. William Sharp sang ‘A Certain Light,’ and when he got to the part where Marie’s brother John speaks, she involuntarily moved towards him on the stage (where she was standing behind a podium, being one of the poets who read her poem before it was sung) because she said it sounded so much like her brother. I wrote the song to conform as much as possible to the natural speech rhythms of the poem. A good portion of it was written at the Millay Colony (Edna St. Vincent Millay’s home, now a place for creative people to work during residencies). All of us working on the songbook talked to Will Parker often during the time preceding the concert, and it seemed the project, while exhausting him, was simultaneously energizing him. There was a strong network of support all around him, and at the concert, it almost didn’t matter which of the 4 baritones was singing.
text by Marie Howe
He had taken the right pills the night before.
We had counted them out
from the egg carton where they were numbered so there’d be no
mistake.
He had taken the morphine and the prednisone and the amitriptyline
and Florinef and vancomycin and Halcion too quickly
and had thrown up in the bowl Joe had brought to the bed—a thin string
of blue spit—then waited a few minutes, to calm himself,
before he took them all again. And had slept through the night
and the morning and was still sleeping at noon—or not sleeping.
He was breathing maybe twice a minute, and we couldn’t wake him,
we couldn’t wake him until we shook him hard calling, John wake up now
John wake up—Who is the president?
And he couldn’t answer.
His doctor told us we’d have to keep him up for hours.
He was all bones and skin, no tissue to absorb the medicine.
He couldn’t walk unless two people held him.
And we made him talk about the movie: What was the best moment in
On the Waterfront? What was the music in Gone with the Wind?
And for seven hours he answered, if only to please us, mumbling
I like the morphine, sinking, rising, sleeping, rousing,
then only in pain again—but wakened.
So wakened that late that night in one of those still blue moments
that were a kind of paradise, he finally opened his eyes wide,
and the room filled with a certain kind of light we thought we’d never see again.
Look at you two, he said. And we did.
And Joe said, Look at you. And John said, How do I look?
And Joe said, Handsome.