“The Gallant Weaver” from And He’ll Be Mine (2005)
Dennis Tobenski, tenor
Marc Peloquin, piano

The Gallant Weaver
Where Cart rins rowin’ to the sea,
By mony a flower and spreading tree,
There lives a lad, the lad for me,
He is a gallant Weaver.

O, I had wooers aught or nine,
They gied me rings and ribbons fine;
And I was fear’d my heart wad tine,
And I gied it to the Weaver.

My daddie sign’d my tocher-band,
To gie the lad that has the land,
But to my heart I’ll add my hand,
And give it to the Weaver.

While birds rejoice in leafy bowers,
While bees delight in opening flowers,
While corn grows green in summer showers,
I love my gallant Weaver.

-Robert Burns

On a lark, I did a little search for my name and came up with a recently posted video of The Passionate Shepherd to His Love performed by the Southern Miss Chamber Singers, conducted by an old friend, Dr. Andrew Jensen. Andy was a member of the ISU Madrigal Singers during my days in the choir, and was a singer in the premiere of Passionate Shepherd. This is a truly beautiful performance:

This performance made use of the revisions I did for the Coast Guard Academy performance last year, along with some new changes to the percussion part. This time, at the suggestion of Ingrid Gordon, we replaced both the tom-toms and wood blocks with temple blocks, which made the whole piece so much lighter and freer. I’m really happy with the new instrumentation.

Here, for your listening pleasure, is the recording that I made of Starfish at the concert.

Thanks to Missy and Percussia for such a fabulous performance!

Enjoy!

I composed the piece in 2003 specifically for the Madrigal Singers, a group that I was a member of for all four years of my undergraduate career at ISU. The group’s director, Dr. James Major – also the Director of the School of Music at the time (now the Dean of the College of Fine Arts) – commissioned the work. In fact, he commissioned me every year I was in the group for a new work for the annual Madrigal Dinners.

This is, I think, the best of my choral works, and is the most demonstrative of them of the push-and-pull / constant metric shifts I wrote about recently.

This particular recording was released on a CD put out by ISU titled “Sing On! Celebrating Fifty Years of Madrigal Dinners at Illinois State University”. A mouthful, that! I’m both conductor and part of the choir here.

(http://www.dennistobenski.com/video.php?cat=2&video=121)

Also available is the first of the night’s two encores, a “preview” of “In the dark pine-wood” from till night is overgone. I had just finished the cycle a few months prior to this performance while I was at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and was eager to show it off before it would be premiered later that Fall by my younger brother at Illinois State University. Because I wasn’t content merely to have organized the entire event and sung nearly an hour’s worth of the program, I decided to show off my mediocre-at-best piano skills by accompanying Rob on the song. An admirable effort, I think.

All that remains to be uploaded (thanks to the limited size of my hard drive) is David Del Tredici’s “Acrostic Song” from Final Alice – a little birthday treat for David’s 70th birthday, which had been in March, and the party for which I painedly missed because I was several states away so selfishly writing the Joyce cycle. Here, it’s Rob’s turn to flex his pianist muscles. And what muscles they are – Rob’s a first-class musician!

Because Gay Life is performed attacca, it is in one, large 45-minute video.

Coming soon will be the remainder of that program: Roger Zahab’s Autumn Songs, Darien Shulman’s Three Poems of Thomas Moore, and my cycle And He’ll Be Mine.

Dennis sings “At Any Given Moment” from Chester Biscardi’s Modern Love Songs.