Personnel
Niyang Wang – Piano
Mila Zhou – Mezzo Soprano
Xingyue Song – Composer
Track List
- Above the Dock (码头之上) from The Journey of Poets
Source Material:
“Above the Dock” by T. E. Hulme
Poem:
Above the quiet dock in mid night,
Tangled in the tall mast’s corded height,
Hangs the moon. What seemed so far away
Is but a child’s balloon, forgotten after play.
Program Note
At midnight, above a still harbor, T. E. Hulme’s four-line poem holds a single image and lets it quietly turn. The moon hangs snared in a ship’s tall rigging — remote, luminous, seemingly beyond reach. Then the eye adjusts and the vast becomes intimate: the moon is only a child’s balloon, drifted loose and forgotten after play. In that soft reversal, the sublime and the small exchange places.
My setting lives entirely inside this hush. Harmonies built from stacked fifths open a hollow, resonant space — sound without weight, like still water holding a single point of light. One melodic line returns and returns, barely altered, the way ripples move across a dark harbor: not progressing, only breathing. The music doesn’t dramatize the poem’s final image so much as let it settle — the way a realization arrives softly in the middle of the night, the enormous thing revealed, on second glance, as something tender and already half-forgotten.
Award
The Kristin Pankonin Art Song Award
The Kristin Pankonin Art-Song Award was endowed at SFCM by Kristin’s friends and fans to honor her legacy of collaborative music-making, and her passion for new vocal work. Each fall student consortiums composed of a composer, vocalist, and collaborative pianist submit proposals for new English-language art-song cycles. The proposals–which include samples of previous works, the selected poem or text, and vision for the cycle–are vetted by SFCM faculty, with the assistance of outside judges. The winning consortium receives a cash prize, and then creates and rehearses the new piece, which is premiered the following spring at the annual Kristin Pankonin Art-Song Showcase Concert.