Fever

chamber choir a cappella
Fever was written for the 3rd International Choir Biënnale Haarlem, for the Dutch Chamber Choir, with financial support of the Fonds voor de Scheppende Toonkunst. The work was dedicated to Neil Wallace.
Published by Donemus

Fever is based on the poem The sick man by Wallace Stevens.

The sick man

Bands of black men seem to be drifting in the air,

in the south, bands of thousands of black men,

playing mouth-organs in the night or, now, guitars

Here in the North, late, late, there are voices of men,

voices in chorus, singing without words, remote and deep,

drifting choirs, long movements and turnings of sounds.

And in a bed in one room, alone, a listener

waits for the unison of the music of the drifting bands

and the dissolving chorals, waits for it and imagines

the words of winter in which these two will come together,

in the ceiling of the distant room, in which he lies,

The listener, listening to the shadows, seeing them,

choosing out of himself, out of everything within him,

speech for the quiet, good hail of himself, good hail, good hail,

the peaceful, blissfull words, well-tuned, well-sung, well-spoken.

From: the collected poems of Wallace Stevens. (publ. Alfred A. Knopf, New York)