Nicholas Wolf shared a number of unpublished poems, hoping one might inspire a new choral work. Tocsins is one that answered the call. It is written in memory of the poet’s mother, and dedicated to the Coretto Cavallaro.

A tocsin is an alarm bell, and as the poem wrestles with the pain of a loved one’s imminent loss, the alarm sounds for both the narrator and the reader. The piece opens with a C-minor figure whose first three notes, a plaintive C, E-flat, C, sound the narrator’s call to his mother and color everything that follows. The mother is first seen “hunting for the exits,” the texture muffled and foggy, recalling the fog in which she once “finished a sweater” while gloomy excursions to B-flat minor and related keys paint the scene. Then the fog clears: she raises her head to “be in another place,” and the music arrives at the harbor of “old glass.” At this sustained chord moment, the altos hold low G beneath the tenor middle C — an uncommon, becalmed inversion of the voices that fixes the still, glassy surface in sound. At “I can’t go with her,” a long series of descending, offset suspensions enacts the narrator’s gradual realization that he can offer her no more help. The final chord turns to C major at “My petitions soar” but set low in the voices, implying that resolution arrives without lift.

This setting is a serious, affecting work for an a cappella SATB choir comfortable with sustained, expressive singing. Here is Wolf’s complete poem: