Having spent six years as a child growing up just outside of Denver, CO in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains I am extremely familiar with the awe-inspiring experience of a mountain sunset. So when I read the dense and breathtaking imagery in Emily Dickinson's poem, How the old Mountains Drip with Sunset, her words immediately brought me back to the many nights I spent in my backyard watching the dying sun dip below the mountain peaks:

 

How the old Mountains drip with Sunset

How the Hemlocks burn —

How the Dun Brake is draped in Cinder By the Wizard Sun —

How the old Steeples hand the Scarlet Till the Ball is full —

 

Have I the lip of the Flamingo That I dare to tell?

Then, how the Fire ebbs like Billows —

Touching all the Grass With a departing — Sapphire — feature —

As a Duchess passed —

 

How a small Dusk crawls on the Village

Till the Houses blot

And the odd Flambeau, no men carry

Glimmer on the Street —

 

How it is Night — in Nest and Kennel —

And where was the Wood —

Just a Dome of Abyss is Bowing

Into Solitude —

 

These are the Visions flitted Guido —

Titian — never told —

Domenichino dropped his pencil —

Paralyzed, with Gold.

 

     Though my work does not follow the form of Dickinson’s poem, it does draw its motivic and thematic elements from her words. There is a musical motive for the mountains, a theme for the sunset, cluster chords representing the beautifully intense and glowing sunlight, and even an emphasis on the notes D-E as a musical tribute to Emily Dickinson. The piece starts with a musical depiction of a sunset in the Rockies, and then dies away into a more gentle and understated “night music”. In the absence of any redeeming sunlight the night music takes a sinister turn, and darkness begins to envelop the piece. But the light eventually returns in the form of a clarinet solo, and the subsequent sunrise, in all of its resplendent glory restores color, beauty, and light to the world.