She is as white as snow when she is blooming.
I want to pluck her for myself,
But I’m afraid of gossips around.
Her looks can eclipse all others in the garden.
I want to pluck her for myself,
But I’m afraid that she won’t bud next year.
Sung in Chinese
– Jackson Hill (b. 1941)
Born in Birmingham, Alabama, Jackson Hill was a Morehead Scholar at the University
of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, where he earned his Ph.D. in musicology. He studied
Buddhist liturgical music in Japan on a Fullbright at the Chishaku-In in Kyoto, and has
made a specialty of Japanese traditional music. Since 1968 Hill has taught at Bucknell
University in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, where he is Presidential Professor of Music.
traditional music. Voices of Autumn (“Aki no ko-e”) was composed in 1982 following
a summer the composer spent in Japan on a Fulbright grant studying Buddhist
liturgical chant. Hill’s setting of the 9th century poem by Sarumaru Daya uses several
Japanese stylistic devices: pentatonic scale, absence of harmonic motion, minimal
rhythmic forward motion, suspension of time, glissandos, and ornamentation
derived from chant and ancient Japanese court music. The work uses deliberate
word painting in making musical reference to footsteps in the fallen leaves and in
the cry of the stag.
The compositions of Dr. Hill are familiar to Chanticleer audiences. In the fortieth
anniversary program, Then and There, Here and Now we sang another of his pieces
inspired by study in Japan, “In Winter’s Keeping.” In this season’s international sacred
program, Faith of our Fathers
work he wrote in celebration of the 1100th anniversary of the founding of Gloucester
Cathedral, “Were Soul to Speak.”
In the mountains’ heart
As I trudge through fallen leaves,
|