Let Thy Loud Heart Keep (2026)
for saxophone quartet
6 minutes
Instrumentation: soprano saxophone, alto saxophone, tenor saxophone, baritone saxophone
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Program Note
"Let Thy Loud Heart Keep" is based on a line from a poem by Percy Shelley called "Adonais". It is one of the most famous elegies in English literature. I have been fascinated with English Romantic poetry for some time and have refrenced the genre in my pieces "Vespers Nine" and "Ring Out, Wild Bells", which are based on poems by Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Alfred Tennyson. This fascination was expanded when I watched Guillermo del Toro's "Frankenstein" in December 2025. Mary Shelley, the author of "Frankenstein", married another English poet—Percy Shelley—who did not become well-known until after his death at the age of 29.
The poem "Adonais" contains such beautiful language and imagery I felt the words resonate with the music I was beginning to write for this piece. The third stanza reads:
"Oh, weep for Adonais—he is dead!Wake, melancholy Mother, wake and weep!Yet wherefore? Quench within their burning bedThy fiery tears, and let thy loud heart keepLike his, a mute and uncomplaining sleep;For he is gone, where all things wise and fairDescend—oh, dream not that the amorous DeepWill yet restore him to the vital air;Death feeds on his mute voice, and laughs at our despair."
I find the acceptance of death, and the resolving of grief such a powerful statement that Shelley makes. In this piece, the music fights itself over and over, never quite achieving its goal. Only when it accepts itself does it resolve.
Harrington_LetThyLoudHeartKeep_EXAMPLE.pdfPerformances
May 4, 2026 John A. Paulson Center, New York University, Manhattan, NY. NYU Saxophone Ensemble.
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