The grasses (Maggie Furtak)
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- (Posted 2025-07-07) CPDL #85828:
- Editor: Maggie Furtak (submitted 2025-07-07). Score information: A4, 7 pages, 125 kB Copyright: Personal
- Edition notes:
General Information
Title: The grasses
Composer: Maggie Furtak
Lyricist: Walt Whitman
Number of voices: 4vv Voicing: SATB
Genre: Secular, Motet
Language: English
Instruments: Piano
First published: 2025
Description: This SATB piece contrasts text from Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass with 1 Peter 1:24 "All flesh is as grass..." in a reflection on mortality and morality. Since our lives are finite, how shall we behave ourselves? Whitman's uplifting text urges us to think for ourselves and when we discover the right thing to do, to do it, letting our lives speak for our morals. The biblical passage reminds us that our time can be beautiful, but will be short on the universal scale, lending urgency to Whitman's words. About 3 minutes. Cheerful in tone with a rhythmically interesting part for the pianist. Will require rehearsal time, but not too difficult for an experienced adult chorus.
External websites:
Original text and translations
English text
“…read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body...” -excerpt from the preface to Leaves of Grass, Walt Whitman
For all flesh is as grass, and all the glory of man as the flower of grass. The grass withereth, and the flower thereof falleth away: 1 Peter 1:24