Nothing Gold Can Stay

Program Notes:

The first of three pieces in ‘A Frost Sequence’, commissioned by Dan Leader and Deborah Finlayson for Mark Vuorinen and Elora Singers, 2021

The SSAA arrangement of Nothing Gold Can Stay was written for Elizabeth MacIsaac and Ensemble Laude.

Composer / Arranger Notes:

‘A Frost Sequence’ was composed as a continuous set of three poems – Nothing Gold Can Stay; The Road Not Taken; Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening – and the Elora Singers, under the innovative direction of Mark Vuorinen have made a stunning recording and video of the sequence. The first piece is very straight forward, like an innocent madrigal, with the repeated phrase ‘nothing gold can stay’ reminding us to seize golden moments while they last. The second is Frost’s famous poem about choosing ‘the road less travelled’. Strangely, the title of the poem refers to the ‘road not taken’ and I hear some regret in these words, that one can never turn back time and reverse the consequences of making a choice, right or wrong. The last song depicts an almost motionless musical environment. Perhaps it is the same wanderer looking into the wintry woods, longing to find that golden road not taken, but unable to indulge that ‘lovely, dark and deep’ path since there are promises to keep, and miles to go.

Text:

Nature’s first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf’s a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.

Text Source

Robert Frost