Text from “Fairyland” by Edgar Allan Poe (adapted by Jeremy Gill).
PROGRAM NOTE:
Dreamland was composed as a companion piece to Charles Ivesʼs Sunrise for voice, violin, and piano, for a concert I performed with the Dolce Suono Ensemble and baritone Daniel Lickteig. My setting of Poe was intended as an inversion of the Ives, with the transcendentalist positivism of his sunrise answered by the weird, many-mooned landscape that Poe imagined.
The text of Dreamland is my free adaptation of Poeʼs poem titled “Fairyland.” Poe has written a separate poem titled “Dreamland”; I adopted this title for my adaptation because I felt it was more abstract and less mythical than “Fairyland,” and because these two poems apparently were of a piece for Poe, as they share two (slightly varied) lines.