The Fall of America

“When the New York Treble Singers asked me to write a choral piece after the onset of the Iraqi conflict of 2003, I wrote The Fall of America. While their brief had nothing to do with a response to war, I had a need to make one. In that response, and following a trip to Russia just previously, I set out to counteract the ugliness of war with the beauty of sonorities that I experienced in Russia and the imagery in William Blake’s poetry. To express this dichotomy of ugliness and beauty, I chose to pair rich, sonorous harmonies with an early Renaissance-style string technique used in the accompaniment. The mixing of the two Blake poems — The Garden of Love and For the Sexes — with the few lines of Ginsberg’s The Fall of America gives a modern feel to the words and enhances the meaning.”

–Eleonor Sandresky, 2004