Hymn to a Resplendent Dawn is a piece that quickly grew in scale for me. When I started writing the beginning sketches of what would later become this work in May of 2021 I thought that it would be a short semi-programmatic work about 6-10 minutes long. As I kept writing, the piece kept growing in scale and would often be put on the backburner as I worked on other projects. At the start of 2024, I decided that it was time for me to finish this project. I looked at the material I had written and realized that I had enough to create three different movements and that is when it dawned on me, if you will pardon the pun, that this became a work that was symphonic in nature.

As its name would imply, Hymn to a Resplendent Dawn is a three movement exploration of a moment in time I experienced two years ago. Many of my friends and I are night owls and there have been times that we have talked the night away only for the sun to rise and let us know that it is time to sleep. Living in the New England countryside, the sunrise comes with chatter from various birds, especially the hermit thrush. After one of our late night conversations, I found myself driving home right as the sun was rising. Right as I made it home, I decided to sit in my garden and take in the dawn. What I heard was a serenade of birdsong, distant church bells, and the wind chimes of my garden creating a moment that scored the sunrise so perfectly. Each movement reflects an aspect of that morning.

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Dawnchaser is a term I coined with my friends about the number of times we have all attempted to drive home before the sun’s rise, often to no avail. I have driven home more times than I care to admit as the sun is rising. Driving in those twilight hours always has an otherworldly liminal feel to it that I have greatly enjoyed.

 

Golden Hour gets its name from the period of time right after sunrise or right before a sunset that is favored by many photographers due to the warm natural light of the sun. The golden hour was the moment that I sat down in my garden and heard the serenade. It is a moment that sits with me forever and I was glad to have captured it in a musical form.

 

The final movement's title comes from the poet Hilda Doolittle’s poem “Heliodora”, “…and the outer dawn came in” is one of the lines within the poem. Hilda Doolittle, who goes by the pen name H.D., is a poet I frequently return to for musical inspiration and is someone whose poems I have set to art songs before. The poem itself, however, is only tangentially related to this symphony. It is about the narrator and one other figure talking until the morning discussing “gifts for a name”. The poem being focused on a singular topic and its similar inspiration drew me to quoting it for the finale.

 

My compositional style has grown a lot in the time I had written this piece. The earliest sketches can be found in the theme of the second movement while the outer movements are much newer in comparison. Hymn to a Resplendent Dawn combines these different explorations of music that has ultimately become my personal style.

Hymn to a Resplendent Dawn is dedicated to my grandfather, John Robert Howe, who passed away a month before I finished writing the piece.