Dear Old Year/ Cherise Leiter, Composer

Dear Old Year

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Dear Old Year (the memories of a matriarch) (2024)

Medium: soprano and clarinet

Length: ~20 min

Dear Old Year (the memories of a matriarch) is a cycle of songs for soprano and clarinet composed between September 2023 and January 2024. The texts for the movements are drawn from the journal entries of Mary Johnson Chapin (1835-1918)—the composer’s great-great-great grandmother. She was a remarkable woman, practical, deeply religious, unselfish, devoted to family, with an ability to gracefully adapt to the many changes in her life.

In a journal that she kept between 1901-1916, and was found in the granary of her grandson’s farm, she recorded her thoughts about life, familial relations, and the everyday workings of a farm. She kept records of remedies for assorted ailments, the genealogy of various branches of the family, and wrote down poems and hymns that she found particularly inspirational. The first movement, “Dear Flavel” is one of the first entries in the journal and is a letter she wrote to her husband who had passed away four months before. The second, fourth, and sixth movements are settings of cures for common ailments at the time. A deeply devout woman, she recorded her dismay at learning of the ways her grandsons and their friends spent the Lord’s Day in the third movement, “Sabbath.” Potatoes played a prominent role in her life during these years, and the text for the fifth movement is drawn from quite a few entries in the journal documenting the harvesting of them and the amount gathered. (The child C.G. mentioned in this movement is the composer’s great-grandfather.) The last movement, “Dear Old Year” is a compilation of her December 31st entries from the years 1902, 1903, 1904, 1906, and 1910.

The musical setting of each of these movements strives to enhance and promote the meaning of the text. Simple, folk-like melodies, fluidity of meter as well as passages where the soprano and clarinet must negotiate complicated syncopated rhythms, and a fair amount of chromaticism and modulation are evidenced throughout the work as a whole.

Price: $25