DEWDROPS: Songs for D. Elliott Wilbur
​mezzo soprano & electric guitar

Dewdrops is a collection of songs composed in honor of my grandfather, D. Elliott Wilbur.   Dually commissioned by mezzo soprano Ariel Pisturino, and by my mother, Ginnie Wilbur Miller, in honor of her father, the collection includes settings of three poems with some significance to my grandfather’s life, for voice and electric guitar. 

Each of the three settings includes musical motives and melodic shapes composed by my grandfather.  He took a music theory class as an elective in college in the 1940’s, loved jazz and Bach, and was a talented boogie-woogie pianist, drummer and member of the church choir.  After my grandfather’s passing in 2012, my grandmother found a number of his theory assignments and Baroque-style composition projects.  She shared these old documents with me, and from them I then took melodic excerpts and bits to modify and re-harmonize in my own settings.   

All three of the settings include these variations and adaptations of my grandfather’s melodies, in fact, most of the soprano part can be related to his melodies in some way or another.  It is from this compositional process, and from his initials, that the work gets its title “Dewdrops.”
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TEXTS
Public Domain

Hope is the thing with feathers
   - Emily Dickinson


Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul, 
And sings the tune without the words,
And never stops at all,

And sweetest in the gale is heard;
And sore must be the storm
That could abash the little bird
​That kept so many warm

I’ve heard it in the chillest land,
And on the strangest sea;
Yet, never, in extremity,
It asked a crumb of me.

One bright day in the middle of the night
    - unknown

Ladies and Gentlemen, 
Beggars and Tramps,
Cross-eyed mosquitos and bow legged ants,
Pull up a chair and sit on the floor
And I’ll tell you a story you’ve never heard before. 

One bright day in the middle of the night 
Two dead boys got up to fight 
Back to back they faced each other 
Drew their swords and shot each other 

One was blind and the other couldn't see 
So they chose a dummy for a referee. 
A blind man went to see fair play 
A dumb man went to shout "hooray!" 

A stone-deaf sheriff heard the noise,
And came and save those two dead boys.
The mute psychotic shrieked in fright,
With words of joy at this ghastly sight. 

Now if you doubt this lie is true?
Ask the blind man; he saw it, too.”

The Lake Isle of Innisfree
    - William Butler Yeats

I arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made;
Nine bean rows will I have there, a hive for the honey bee,
And live alone in the bee loud glade. 

And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,
Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;
There midnight’s all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
And evening full of the linnet’s wings. 

I will arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,
I hear it in the deep heart’s core.