For The Congressional Chorus of the United States, June 1995
These were meant to be simple arrangements of three Appalachian folk songs, but they turned out to be rather intricate: simpler isn’t always clearer. Certainly one could have merely embedded “Copper Kettle,” a deliciously comic moonshiner’s manifesto, in these or those idiomatic chords: but why stop there, if the chorus can themselves become the burbling still, the stealthy loggers, the drunken townsfolk in the pale moonlight? “Wildwood Flower,” a lament so unguarded it stops the breath, needed only the plainest triads, only a sustained A-natural wandering ceaselessly from voice to voice as if in search of the abandoning lover, to frame it; but “Long Black Veil,” a deadpan confession from beyond the grave of a how his married lover, by keeping silent, sent him wrongly to the gallows—and promptly went mad with grief—well, how can you set that without including the vengeful prosecutors, the whistling winds, and the deranged vocalise of the guilty woman? Or all of them at once?
Matewan Music, of twelve minutes duration, was commissioned and introduced by the Congressional Chorus of the United States in June 1995: it is scored for unaccompanied SATB choir and soprano solo.