A Demon in My View

A Demon in My View is a setting of Edgar Allan Poe’s “Alone” for SATB a cappella, titled from the poem’s haunting final image. I wrote it in 2022 in Gilbert, Arizona, where I currently live; it is the first piece I composed after relocating from New Jersey. I came across the poem by chance, and its vision of a soul set apart from childhood seized me at once, arriving to me immediately with its three-part shape already formed.

The music follows the poem’s arc from estrangement through storm to dread. It opens Adagio e con tristezza in E minor, a soft, almost parlando homophony blurred with added sevenths and ninths, the harmony itself unsettled as the speaker confesses he has never seen or felt “as others” did. The line “all I lov’d, I lov’d alone” turns strange and dissonant, coming to rest on a hollow, empty chord. A spare bridge follows, the voices entering one by one and stacking up, then peeling away, on “the mystery which binds me still.”

From there an Agitato fugue in Phrygian-tinted B minor drives the poem’s catalogue of storm imagery: a short, stepwise subject passes upward through the voices in overlapping pairs, climbing from the torrent and the fountain to the cliff, the mountain, and the sun, the singers tumbling over one another in staggered melismas on “roll’d.”

The closing section returns the opening’s homophonic narration, now rendered as a double canon. The harmony takes a diminshed turn at “cloud that took the form” with an odd blue chord underscoring that the rest of nature “was blue.” The text repeats, but now broken by fermatas, as if the speaker is stumbling to describe what he saw in that ominous cloud. Then the true climactic tension builds: on “of a demon,” a vast slow crescendo gathers into G minor and erupts in parallel tritones, pitched high in the women’s voices, as a deliberate invocation of the old diabolus in musica that shrieks a genuinely disturbing siren of sound. After that crashing dissonance, a long rallentando sees the apparition dissolve into the air. The piece ends not on the expected E-minor resolution, but on an unresolved sonority, the unease lingering well after the eerie vision has dissipated.

The first audio clip is the opening of the piece. The second starts at measure 44 at the top of page 6, just before the soprano entrance in the fugue. Here is Poe’s complete poem:

Alone

From childhood’s hour I have not been
As others were — I have not seen
As others saw — I could not bring
My passions from a common spring —

From the same source I have not taken
My sorrow — I could not awaken
My heart to joy at the same tone —
And all I lov’d — I lov’d alone —

Then — in my childhood — in the dawn
Of a most stormy life — was drawn
From ev’ry depth of good and ill
The mystery which binds me still —

From the torrent, or the fountain —
From the red cliff of the mountain —
From the sun that ’round me roll’d
In its autumn tint of gold —

From the lightning in the sky
As it pass’d me flying by —
From the thunder, and the storm —
And the cloud that took the form
(When the rest of Heaven was blue)
Of a demon in my view —

Opus 52 | SATB a cappella | English | 6:00
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