Eric Nathan

Some Favored Nook

$75.00

Duration: 45-50'

Instrumentation: Soprano, baritone, and piano

Instrumentation: Soprano, baritone, piano
Delivery Method: Physical Delivery
Performance Materials: Full Score

“quietly compelling”

- The Boston Globe

“a work that deserves to be heard again and again.”

- Theater Jones

“I have no hesitation calling Some Favored Nook 
the best musical tribute Emily Dickinson has ever received.”

–Fanfare

Some Favored Nook, Eric Nathan (2017) 45-50'
for soprano, baritone, and piano

Libretto by Mark Campbell and Eric Nathan
Adapted from texts by Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson

Some Favored Nook is a dramatic song cycle that speaks to the themes of friendship, national division, morality and conscience. It takes place in Civil War-era America and is inspired by the correspondence between an unlikely pair: poet Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson, a 19th century abolitionist and women’s rights advocate known in his day as an essayist and military officer of the first Black regiment in the Civil War. In 1890, Higginson worked with Mabel Loomis Todd to posthumously publish the first edition of Emily Dickinson’s collected poetry, introducing it to the world.

At its heart, Some Favored Nook is a story about two individuals and their struggles—Dickinson’s to be a poet as a woman in an intensely patriarchal society, and Higginson’s to fight for the abolition of slavery and advocate for female writers’ voices.

The cycle sets texts from Dickinson’s letters and poems she sent to Higginson, and as many of Higginson’s letters to Dickinson are lost, additional texts are set from Higginson’s own essays and diaries from his “Army Life in a Black Regiment,” giving an important historical context to Dickinson’s work.

PART I
I. To tell me what is true?
II. The nearest dream recedes unrealized
III. Could you tell me how to grow?
IV. They shut me up in Prose
V. My barefoot rank is better

PART II
VI. To see if we were growing
VII. War feels to me an oblique place
VIII. There suddenly arose
IX. Emancipation
X. All sounds ceased
XI. There came a wind like a bugle
XII. Attending to the wounded
XIII. That shamed the nation

PART III
XIV. These are my introduction
XV. My Wars are laid away in Books / No Prisoner be

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153-066-FS
Instrumentation: Soprano, baritone, piano
Delivery Method: Physical Delivery
Performance Materials: Full Score

About the Work

Duration: 45-50'

Movements:
PART I
I. To tell me what is true?
II. The nearest dream recedes unrealized
III. Could you tell me how to grow?
IV. They shut me up in Prose
V. My barefoot rank is better

PART II
VI. To see if we were growing
VII. War feels to me an oblique place
VIII. There suddenly arose
IX. Emancipation
X. All sounds ceased
XI. There came a wind like a bugle
XII. Attending to the wounded
XIII. That shamed the nation

PART III
XIV. These are my introduction
XV. My Wars are laid away in Books / No Prisoner be

Instrumentation: Soprano, baritone, and piano

Some Favored Nook is a dramatic song cycle that speaks to the themes of friendship, national division, morality and conscience. It takes place in Civil War-era America and is inspired by the correspondence between an unlikely pair: poet Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson, a 19th century abolitionist and women’s rights advocate known in his day as an essayist and military officer of the first Black regiment in the Civil War. In 1890, Higginson worked with Mabel Loomis Todd to posthumously publish the first edition of Emily Dickinson’s collected poetry, introducing it to the world. At its heart, Some Favored Nook is a story about two individuals and their struggles—Dickinson’s to be a poet as a woman in an intensely patriarchal society, and Higginson’s to fight for the abolition of slavery and advocate for female writers’ voices. The cycle sets texts from Dickinson’s letters and poems she sent to Higginson, and as many of Higginson’s letters to Dickinson are lost, additional texts are set from Higginson’s own essays and diaries from his “Army Life in a Black Regiment,” giving an important historical context to Dickinson’s work.

ISMN: 979-0-094-00802-0

Pages: 93