Here’s one I made earlier! I wrote this in autumn 2006; I’d asked for texts to set, and my then-sweetheart suggested these lines by Tennyson:
Come, my friends,
‘Tis not too late to seek a newer world.
Push off, and sitting well in order smite
The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
Of all the western stars, until I die.
It may be that the gulfs will wash us down:
It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,
And see the great Achilles, whom we knew.Though much is taken, much abides; and though
We are not now that strength which in the old days
Moved earth and heaven; that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.
I’m not sure why I decided on TBB for this, but I did. I don’t know any male-voice choirs, so as yet this work is unperformed. In fact, it ended up on an old website and I was only able to reconstruct it because someone had kindly e-mailed me a .pdf. But I married the man who suggested the text, so I guess he likes it… I still have trouble choosing texts to set, though I’m gradually getting better at that.
The .pdf and .mid files are available from ChoralWiki/CPDL as usual, and this work is released under a CC BY-SA licence.
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