''Frostiana: Seven Country Songs'' is a piece for mixed
chorus and
piano
The piano is a stringed keyboard instrument in which the strings are struck by wooden hammers that are coated with a softer material (modern hammers are covered with dense wool felt; some early pianos used leather). It is played using a keybo ...
composed in 1959 by
Randall Thompson. It premiered on October 18, 1959, in
Amherst, Massachusetts. Thompson later scored the piece for
chamber orchestra and chorus; this version was first performed on April 23, 1965.
Thompson was commissioned by the town of Amherst to write a piece commemorating its
bicentennial __NOTOC__
A bicentennial or bicentenary is the two-hundredth anniversary of a part, or the celebrations thereof. It may refer to:
Europe
*French Revolution bicentennial, commemorating the 200th anniversary of 14 July 1789 uprising, celebrated ...
in 1959. The town was known for its association with
Robert Frost, who had lived there for some years. Frost had known Thompson for some time, and admired his music; accordingly, it was decided that the commemorative work would be a setting of some of Frost's poetry. The town suggested "
The Gift Outright"; Thompson, however, feared that the text was inappropriate for the occasion, and asked to be allowed to choose his own texts. In the end, the composer selected seven poems, with which he constructed a seven-movement suite of choral
art songs:
*"
The Road Not Taken
"The Road Not Taken" is a narrative poem by Robert Frost, first published in the August 1915 issue of ''The Atlantic Monthly'', and later published as the first poem in the collection '' Mountain Interval'' of 1916. Its central theme is th ...
"
*"The Pasture"
*"Come In"
*"The Telephone"
*"A Girl's Garden"
*"
Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening
"Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" is a poem by Robert Frost, written in 1922, and published in 1923 in his ''New Hampshire'' volume. Imagery, personification, and repetition are prominent in the work. In a letter to Louis Untermeyer, Fros ...
"
*"Choose Something Like a Star"
As the male and female choruses rehearsed separately, Thompson structured the work so that they sang together only in three of the seven movements; each of the other four was scored for either male voices or female voices alone.
A number of recordings of ''Frostiana'' exist, and it is still performed with some frequency.
References
*Randall Thompson. ''The Testament of Freedom/Frostiana''. Manhattan Chamber Orchestra and New York Choral Society, Richard Auldon Clark, director. Recorded 1994; released on Koch International Classics in 1995.
{{Authority control
1959 compositions
Compositions by Randall Thompson
Choral compositions
Composer tributes (classical music)
Amherst, Massachusetts
Robert Frost