"New England Transcendentalists (2003)" genre: Strings
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	Four movements for string quartet: Emerson, Hawthorne, Louisa May Alcott & Thoreau.
	CD: Music by Thomas Oboe Lee   Label: DFM Credits: Hawthorne String Quartet
	Story Behind the Song Program note. I met the Hawthorne String Quartet in 1997 when Jim Christie and the New England Composers Recording Project brought us together to record four of my string quartets for Koch International Classics. Since then Mark Ludwig, violist and founder of the Quartet, has commissioned me to write several works for the Quartet, Musicworks, and the Terezin Chamber Music Foundation. In the fall of 2002 I decided to return the favor with a gift of a new quartet for Mark and his colleagues, Ronan Lefkowitz, Haldan Martinson and Sato Knudsen. The name “Hawthorne” immediately brought to mind Charles Ives’ Second Piano Sonata, also known as the “Concord Sonata,“ in which Ives composed a separate movement for each of the four Transcendentalist writers from Concord, Massachusetts: Emerson, Hawthorne, Alcott and Thoreau. I thought I would do the same for the string quartet. In 1920, Charles Ives published a book, “Essays before a Sonata,” which is actually a long set of program notes for the Concord Sonata. In my reading of the Emerson chapter, I came upon the following: “ … a Gospel hymn of simple devotion came to him---“There’s a wideness in God’s mercy”---an instant suggestion of that Memorial Day morning comes---but the moment is of deeper import---there is no personal exultation---no intimate world vision---no magnified personal hope---and in their place a profound sense of a spiritual truth---a sin within reach of forgiveness. And as the hymn voices die away, there lies at his feet---not the world, but the figure of the Saviour---he sees an unfathomable courage---an immortality for the lowest---the vastness in humility, the kindness of the human heart, man’s noblest strength---and he knows that God is nothing---nothing, but love!” I also came upon an anecdote in Ives’ “114 Songs” of a conversation between Ralph Waldo Emerson and Oliver Wendell Holmes. “The latter said that many of the hymns in use were mere pieces of cabinet work. Then his voice deepened and his eyes shone, as they did in his noblest moments, and he said, “One hymn I think supreme.” Emerson threw back his head and waited while Dr Holmes repeated the text of the following song. ‘Thou hidden love of God, whose height, whose depth, unfathomed, no man knows …’ Emerson responded, “I know that is the supreme hymn. ‘I shall be satisfied when I awake in Thy likeness.’” It took me a while, but eventually I did find Emerson’s hymn with that line; the last line is from Psalm 17. The hymn, composed by Frederic F, Bullard, 1864-1904, with texts by Longfellow, is entitled, “Lord, Hear the Right.”

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