Nevermore was commissioned for the 30th Anniversary of the University of New Hampshire's Summer Youth Music School (SYMS) Junior Orchestra, Kate Comeau, director, through the generous support of the Duane Whittier Music Fund. It was an extraordinary honor to receive this commission, as I have taught at the SYMS camp for almost 30 years and was the coordinator for almost 10 years, and the honor was made even more exciting because I was given the opportunity to write for string orchestra, a new challenge for me as a composer. My sincere thanks to David Upham, coordinator of SYMS, for giving me the chance.

Nevermore is inspired by Edgar Allen Poe’s famous poem from 1845, “The Raven,” which traces a man’s thoughts and emotions as he contemplates the death of his beloved Lenore. The poem begins as the man sits by the fire one evening. He hears a tapping and eventually opens a window to find a raven, who enters the room and alights on a nearby statue. The man begins to question the bird and is surprised when it answers him with the single word “Nevermore.” He begins to ask more questions, focusing on Lenore and querying if he will ever forget his love and if he will reunite with her in death, but the raven just answers each of the man’s increasingly desperate questions with the simple word, “Nevermore.”

I attempted to capture the essence of “The Raven” by using a melody which is presented six times, mirroring the concept of multiple verses in the original poem. With each presentation the tempo increases, portraying the protagonist as he swirls into despair and eventual madness. The notes of this melody coincide directly with the syllables and cadences of the verses from the original poem, such that one could literally sing along with it using the poem itself as the lyrics. Additionally, much of the melodic and harmonic ideas in the work are created using the first phrase of the Gregorian chant, “Dies Irae” (“Day of Wrath”), a melody long associated with death and the final judgment. The tune has been widely used throughout music history by composers such as Hector Berlioz, Johannes Brahms, Frederic Chopin, Geroge Crumb, Michael Daugherty, Gustav Holst, Gustav Mahler, Sergei Rachmaninoff, Camille Saint-Saens, Dmitri Shostakovich, and Pytor Tchaikovsky, as well as in the film scores to movies such as The Shining, The Nightmare Before Christmas, Poltergeist, Citizen Kane, KPop Demon Hunters, The Lord of the Rings trilogy, Home Alone, and Star Wars, among others.