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A Noiseless Patient Spider

(text: Walt Whitman)
for voice and piano; 4’  (2018)

performed by Karen Wemhoener (mezzo soprano) and Bernadette Lo (piano) :
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Scott Gendel · A Noiseless Patient Spider

​composer's note: "A Noiseless Patient Spider" has always been one of my very favorite Whitman poems.  It's short, but in those two stanzas are some of Walt Whitman's profoundest, most expansive musings about the nature of human souls.  But also, I just adore how it waxes rhapsodic about spiders, elevating them to beautiful metaphors for human existence, rather than their usual status as a bug you might step on. My setting of this masterpiece treats Whitman's words about arachnids & souls with suitable reverence, beginning with small gestures in the piano and then opening up into huge dramatic pronouncements with a majesty befitting the noble spider.

sample page:

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