Crossing the Bar – TTBB
£2.95
A new setting of the 1889 by Alfred, Lord Tennyson (traditionally the last poem in collections of his work). Ian Assersohn’s piece for male voice choirs won the Composers’ Competition at the Cornwall International Male Voice Choir Festival.
A new setting of the 1889 by Alfred, Lord Tennyson (traditionally the last poem in collections of his work). Ian Assersohn’s piece for male voice choirs won the Composers’ Competition at the Cornwall International Male Voice Choir Festival, from a field of 40 entries. Assersohn is the Musical Director of Epsom Male Voice Choir and the choir sang the world première at the International Male Voice Choir Festival Opening International Gala Concert in Truro Cathedral.Tennyson wrote Crossing the Bar after a serious illness while at sea. It is thought that Tennyson wrote it in elegy, as the poem has a tone of finality about it. The narrator uses an extended metaphor to compare death to crossing the “sandbar” between the tide or river of life, with its outgoing “flood,” and the ocean that lies beyond death, the “boundless deep,” to which we return. Shortly before he died, Tennyson told his son Hallam to “put ‘Crossing the Bar’ at the end of all editions of my poems”. The poem contains four stanzas that generally alternate between long and short lines. Tennyson employs a traditional ABAB rhyme scheme. Scholars have noted that the form of the poem follows the content: the wavelike quality of the long-then-short lines parallels the narrative thread of the poem.