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A Voice Passes… provides musical commentary on three haiku by the 19th-century poet Masaoka Shiki and one by the legendary master he most admired, Yosa Buson. Stricken with tuberculosis and addicted to morphine in the later years of his short life, Shiki wrote a large number of haiku that dealt with the pain and suffering caused by his illness. Of these, many were at the same time infused with humor and optimism. The haiku I’ve selected as the programmatic bases of the individual movements are laid out in a “four-seasons” sequence and progress from the despair and resignation of summer to the hopefulness and vibrancy of spring – a not-so-subtle metaphor for the progression of the pandemic in which we currently find ourselves. Herewith are the four poems in order:  I. How much longer; Is my life?; A brief night (Shiki) II. I am going.; You are staying -; Two autumns for us (Shiki) III. Down the narrow lane; A voice passes crying; A midwinter prayer. (Buson) IV. Spring frost; Dancing in the air -; A shimmer of heat (Shiki)  In addition, I’ve structured each movement around a well-known composition that echoes the spirit and content of the haiku serving as the extramusical impetus for that movement. In the first, I reference Henry Purcell’s Funeral Sentences for four voices, four trumpets, and continuo –  specifically, the “March,” “Man that is born of a woman (hath but a short time to live),” and an excerpt from “In the midst of life we are in death.” In my treatment of them, the lines from these pieces are often incomplete, distorted, barely audible, or tinged with noise. Thus, Purcell’s music emerges as if recalled from the fog of distant memory – clearly surfacing now and then, only to quickly recede.  During his final seven years, tuberculosis forced Shiki to withdraw from his previously active way of life. Although he had become a bedridden invalid, he made his home a meeting place for his friends and followers, who gathered there to discuss literature. When I first discovered this fact, I was reminded of another author, philosopher, essayist, and critic who succumbed to tuberculosis and who, while in an admittedly different sort of isolation from the world surrounded himself frequently with literary friends: Henry David Thoreau. Therefore, it seemed fitting to use the beginning phrase of "Thoreau," the final musical portrait from Charles Ives' Concord Sonata for piano, as a sort of “idée fixe” for the second movement of my quartet and to develop this material in such a way as to mirror the antiphonal contrast between the “two autumns” of the haiku on which my movement is based.  In the third movement, I create a deconstruction-reconstruction-deconstruction of Guillaume Dufay’s four-voice isorhythmic motet, O sancte Sebastiane. The three overlapping texts of his work are prayers to St. Sebastian for much needed aid against the plague that ravaged Ferrara in the fifteenth century. By extension, these same prayers might well be offered today for divine help against the pandemic that is gripping the entire planet.  In 1825, Beethoven was afflicted with a serious intestinal disorder from which he feared he would die. Despite his illness, he remained productive and somehow managed to retain his sense of humor – as did Shiki at the end of his life. From my perspective, nothing Beethoven wrote during that period (including his “musical jokes”) reflects his absurdist side more than the quirk “Presto” from his String Quartet No. 13, Op. 130. Barely two minutes long, it is packed with clever rhythmic and textural devices and seems to perfectly depict “spring frost dancing in the air.” I closely follow the framework of Beethoven’s joyous dance in the last movement of my piece – and attempt as well to inject “a shimmer of heat.”  -Claude Baker

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