I wrote Contemplation in August of 2015 for the ChoralNet Showcase Dare, a composition challenge mounted by the ChoralNet community to honor its founder, Dr. James D. Feiszli. Entrants were given a single creative “spark” and one week to submit a finished work. For this round, the spark was Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken.” I responded with my own poem on the ache of the chance never seized, turned over and over in a mind for which “contemplation is a toxic skill.” The piece earned a Gold Medal in the “Use of the Spark” category, and the Silver Medal overall. I dedicated it to Dr. Feiszli, who provided the spark.

The setting is largely homophonic and begins in D minor, though the opening voices are somewhat clustered so the tonality never quite settles. I felt this texture fitting for a mind caught in “repeating rounds” recounting lost opportunity. I painted those rounds directly in the voices, and gave “opportunity knocked” its own small gesture. The second verse opens in D major as the journey “beckoned boldness to begin,” then wanders by way of A-flat minor into a darkening cadence in C minor at “to apply,” the boldness already beginning to curdle.

At “carefree youth” the music swells almost to a wail in all four voices, and collapses back into clusters at “tentative.” (The wording I chose is a quiet literary borrowing: “carefree youth” renders the Gaudeamus Igitur tag post iucundam iuventutem. I set the words in quotation marks because that carefree youth was the song’s, not mine.) The high point of the work comes at “too soon too late,” fortissimo and tenuto, as a D-minor chord tinged by an added fourth depicts the regret of realizing that not choosing is itself a choice. The music then thins to an open A chord, poised as a dominant, at “passed me by.”

The final verse recaps the music of the opening, harmonizing it more elaborately as it unfolds. At “resumes its dance” comes the one contrapuntal stroke in the piece, a brief fughetta that gathers all four voices in turn before narrowing back to homophony at “because,” landing on another biting sonority, two interlocked tritones. The last line of the poem is then handed through the voices in succession to conclude the music as it must: quietly, and on a bare open fifth on D, with no third to resolve the regret, and harmonically illustrating “no second chance.”

The audio clip begins at the opening of the work. Here is the full text: