Drinking With The Moon Alone

Soprano Voice, Alto Saxophone and Piano

Texts and Program notes:

Drinking with the Moon Alone                                    
The Three Hundred Tang Poems were compiled by Qing scholar Sun Zhu and published in 1764.  Sun’s intention was to elect poems that serve to cultivate the character of the reader.  Sun Zhu divided his anthology into six different styles, comprising old style poems (gushi) regular poems (lüshi) and short poems (jueju), both with five and seven syllable verses. His own compilation became so popular that it is enclosed in a corpus of books.  Drinking with the Moon Alone is one of those poems.

I.  Drinking With the Moon Alone
From a pot of wine among the flowers
I drank alone there was no one with me
Till, raising my cup, I asked the bright moon
To bring me my shadow and make us three
Alas, the moon was unable to drink
And my shadow lagged me vacantly
But still for a while I had these friends
To cheer me through the end of spring.
I sang, the moon encouraged me
I danced, my shadow tumbled after.
As long as I knew we were boon companions.
And then I was drunk and we lost one another
Shall goodwill ever be secure?
I watch the long road of the River of Stars.

II.  The Traveller’s Song
The thread in the hands of a fond hearted mother
Makes clothes for the body of her wayward boy;
Carefully she sews and she mends
Dreading the delays that will keep him late from home.
But how much has the inch long grass
For three spring months of the light of the sun?

III.  On a Gate Tower
Where, before me, are the seasons that have gone?
And where, behind me, are the coming generations?
I think of heaven and earth without limit, without end.
And I am all alone and my tears fall down.