Petals of a Rose Close
A dissertation submitted to the
Graduate School
of the University of Cincinnati
in partial fulfillment of the
requirements for the degree of
Doctor of Musical Arts
in the Division of Composition, Musicology and Theory
of the College-Conservatory of Music
By
Brendan Owen Keenan
Master of Music, Longy School of Music, 2009
Bachelor of Music, Berklee College of Music, 2007
2014
Committee Chair: Dr. Mara Helmuth
ii! !
Abstract
Petals of a Rose Close examines in music and prose a poem by Sylvia Plath, Edge
(1963) and a passage from the novel Le Côté de Guermantes (The Guermantes
Way) (1921), by Marcel Proust. Both are about a deceased woman: Proust writes
about his grandmother, while Plath’s poem is more abstract in that the figure has
no identity. Both passages are about purification and perfection following each
subject’s demise. Compositionally, the piece consists of six spoken essay portions
and five pairs of companion canons set to the passage by Proust. Each companion
canon uses the same melody, but alters the temporal, intervallic and key
relationships. Each pair is unique, demonstrating the inexorable changes leading
to the visions of perfection presented by Plath and Proust.
The title refers to a sentence in the poem:
She has folded
Them back into her body as petals
Of a rose close . . .
!
!
iii!
Table of Contents
Abstract
ii
Table of Contents
iii
Title
v
Program and performance notes
vi
Essay
viii
Original French text
x
Translation
xi
Score
1
Bibliography
!
20
!
iv! !
!
Brendan Owen Keenan
Petals of a Rose Close
Reflection and Threnody:
Sylvia Plath’s Edge and
Marcel Proust’s Le Côté de Guermantes
For Reader, SSA Choir and Organ
15 minutes
2014
v!
vi! !
Program note: Petals of a Rose Close examines in music and prose a poem by
Sylvia Plath, Edge (1963) and a passage from the novel Le Côté de Guermantes (The
Guermantes Way) (1921), by Marcel Proust. Both are about a deceased woman:
Proust writes about his grandmother, while Plath’s poem is more abstract in that
the figure has no identity. Both passages are about purification and perfection
following each subject’s demise. Compositionally, the piece consists of six spoken
essay portions and five pairs of companion canons set to the passage by Proust.
Each companion canon uses the same melody, but alters the temporal, intervallic
and key relationships. Each pair is unique, demonstrating the inexorable changes
leading to the visions of perfection presented by Plath and Proust.
The title refers to a sentence in the poem:
She has folded
Them back into her body as petals
Of a rose close . . .
!
vii!
Note on performance: The reader should be clearly cued by the conductor or
organist on the reader’s entrances. If a conductor is present, the conductor should
also cue the organist when the reader is done speaking. Passages that are marked
in repeats should be played as softly as is practical, repeated as necessary and
ceasing soon after the speaker is done even if this is in the middle of the repeated
music. Organ registrations are suggested but otherwise left to the discretion of the
organist or conductor. Imaginative registration is encouraged, but balance with the
choir is especially important.
If possible, Edge should be read aloud before the performance (it is not included in
this score.) This is not a requirement for performance. As of 2014, publishing
rights are held by HarperCollins Publishers. For permissions information, see
http://www.harpercollins.com/footer/permissionsNew.aspx
Edge is published in The Collected Poems by Sylvia Plath, ISBN 0061558893.
viii!!
Essay by Brendan Owen Keenan in response to Sylvia Plath’s Edge (1963). This
essay may be copied and distributed in program notes.
1 (rehearsal no. 1): Perfect, the woman is without flaw in death. Ancient and
civilized as the Greeks, Christian-pure in her white toga, her body smiles to invoke
a grinning skull. Quiescence bestows the authority and gravity of eternity; on the
scrolls of her toga are written the last chapter of the woman's life.
2 (rehearsal no. 18): Lifeless, the imagined room is thus soulless. The body is here
but not the person; the life is spent, not only in the woman but in the children.
Perhaps these literally are hers: one at each breast but dead for the lack of milk in
them. It might be a horror were it not for the white serpents, dead evils of a dying
Garden of Eden, by death free of the sin they birthed. Life was the horror, not
death. So back into her she reclaims them, and like a dying garden that once
flowered and bore fruit, the body offers no more gifts.
3 (rehearsal no. 47): She smiles defiantly that these gifts, her dead children, are at
her dead breasts; she of course should be smiling only at the birth of her children,
the true demanded accomplishment of a woman. The reclamation of them into
her as dead, white serpents furthermore tells that the woman's Death is feminine:
the asp at Cleopatra's breast is the perished one here, undulating as it does with
her curves. Slain by Woman, head uncrushed under the heel of Man, instead dead
by the lack of sin to nourish it in the way these pitchers of milk once nourished her
children. Passionate, corrupt Woman is gone, and in Her place is a pure, amoral
statue barren of temptation, unrisen and unfallen.
4 (rehearsal no. 78): Even the statuesque, stone burial, in dispassionate repose,
suits itself. Bare-footed, white-robed but without ascension; no rebirths need
follow. She is passionless and devoid of sadness, like the moon made from bone.
And why should the moon be sad? She is the light in the night sky, in turns
accepting and rejecting the dark but always predictably; on time, we can set our
calendar by it, and we do. She is, like death, a watcher who always arrives to dispel
the surrounding black of emptiness; a white comfort, the moon together with the
stars dresses the somber earth like the toga the perfect woman wears on her
funerary bed.
!
ix!
5 (rehearsal no. 140): Here lies neither a glorification of death nor a
condemnation of it. Here lies the total neutrality of existence. Here lies the body
hardened in rigor mortis but draped under a soft robe; she is the stiff, dead stem of
a still-beautiful flower whose soft petals follow her. And when bare feet, callused
skin worn away in empathy with a weary, heavy heart, finish a sojourn forced upon
them, the rest is welcome, dolce far niente after the pain and horror of life.
6 (rehearsal no. 172): Would that the rest of us envisioned such an end in concord
with the inevitable future, one with no soul to cheat a harvester, no carving of a
name in stone to cheat oblivion. To live without the terror of the end or even the
simple anxiety of failure is enviable in its way, and simple ceremony, kind respect,
and a warm regard of the beauty that always is and was suffices.
x! !
Original French text, Le Côté de Guermantes by Marcel Proust (1921)1. This page
may be freely copied and distributed.
1 (rehearsal nos. 3 and 11) Quelques heures plus tard, Françoise put une dernière
fois et sans les faire souffrir peigner ces beaux cheveux qui grisonnaient seulement
et jusqu’ici avaient semblé être moins âgés qu’elle.
2 (rehearsal nos. 24 and 36) Mais maintenant, au contraire, ils étaient seuls à
imposer la couronne de la vieillesse sur le visage redevenu jeune d’où avaient
disparu les rides, les contractions, les empâtements, les tensions, les fléchissements
que, depuis tant d’années, lui avait ajoutés la souffrance.
3 (rehearsal nos. 55 and 66) Comme au temps lointain où ses parents lui avaient
choisi un époux, elle avait les traits délicatement tracés par la pureté et la
soumission, les joues brillantes d’une chaste espérance, d’un rêve de bonheur,
même d’une innocente gaieté, que les années avaient peu à peu détruits.
4 (rehearsal nos. 108 and 124) La vie en se retirant venait d’emporter les
désillusions de la vie. Un sourire semblait posé sur les lèvres de ma grand’mère.
5 (rehearsal nos. 146, 159 and 163) Sur ce lit funèbre, la mort, comme le
sculpteur du moyen âge, l’avait couchée sous l’apparence d’une jeune fille.
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
1!
1.!Marcel!Proust,!Le!Côté!de!Guermantes!Project!Gutenberg,!July!2004,!12999,!
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/12999/12999Nh/12999Nh.htm!
!
xi!
Translation by C. K. Scott Moncrieff (1925)2. This page may be freely copied and
distributed.
1 An hour or two later Françoise was able for the last time, and without causing
them any pain, to comb those beautiful tresses which had only begun to turn grey
and hitherto had seemed not so old as my grandmother herself.
2 But now on the contrary it was they alone that set the crown of age on a face
grown young again, from which had vanished the wrinkles, the contractions, the
swellings, the strains, the hollows which in the long course of years had been
carved on it by suffering.
3 As at the far-off time when her parents had chosen for her a bridegroom, she
had the features delicately traced by purity and submission, the cheeks glowing
with a chaste expectation, with a vision of happiness, with an innocent gaiety even
which the years had gradually destroyed.
4 Life in withdrawing from her had taken with it the disillusionments of life. A
smile seemed to be hovering on my grandmother’s lips.
5 On that funeral couch, death, like a sculptor of the middle ages, had laid her in
the form of a young maiden.
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
2!!
1.!Marcel!Proust,!Le!Côté!de!Guermantes,!trans.!C.!K.!Scott!Montcrieff,!eBooks@Adelaide,!March!2014,!
http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/p/proust/marcel/p96g/chapter1.html!
!
xii! !
for Nicole
20 !
Bibliography
Proust, Marcel. Le Côté de Guermantes. Project Gutenberg, 2004.
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/12999/12999-h/12999-h.htm
Proust, Marcel. Le Côté de Guermantes. Translated by C. K. Scott Montcrieff.
eBooks@Adelaide, 2014.
http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/p/proust/marcel/p96g/chapter1.html