Commisioned by the San Francisco Symphony in 1981 to celebrate the inaugural season of the Louise M. Davies Symphony Hall, Harmonium sets the texts of John Donne (Negative Love) and Emily Dickinson (Because I Could Not Stop for Death, and Wild Nights). Orchestral parts available on rental. Duration ca. 35 minutes.

Composer Note
Harmonium began with a simple, totally formed mental image: that of a single tone emerging out of a vast, empty space and, by means of a gentle unfolding, evolving into a rich, pulsating fabric of sound. This wordless "preverbal" creation scene describes the opening of the piece, and it was fixed in my mind's eye long before I had even made the decision whether or not to use a text. Some time passed before I was able to get beyond this initial image. I had an intuition of what the work would feel like, but I could not locate the poetic voice to give it shape. When I finally did settle on a text for the piece I was frankly rather surprised by the oddity of my choice. At almost the same time I happened upon an obscure poem with the irresistible title "Negative Love" by the seventeenth-century English poet John Donne and two poems by the nineteenth-century American Emily Dickinson which, together with the Donne poem, suggested a completed unity of form and meaning.
John Adams