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A Child's Garden of Verses

Three poems by Robert Louis Stevenson set to music by

David Taddie

Penny Steiner-Grossman, soprano

Susan Berkowitz, flute
Charles Maurer, clarinet
Linda Douglas, violin
Gwendoline Thornblade, viola
Karen Romer, cello
Liz Weis, piano

8 August 2000
56th Annual Compoers Conference, Wellesley, MA
These tracks can be downloaded in two forms, MP3 and MP4. The latter is a standard format that creates smaller files with higher quality. A free player from Apple will handle either format on Windows or Macintosh computers.

Foreign Lands — 2.2-MB MP3

Up into the cherry tree
Who should climb but little me?
I held the trunk with both my hands
And looked abroad on foreign lands.

I saw the next door garden lie,
Adorned with flow'rs, before my eye,
And many pleasant places more
That I had never seen before.

From a Railway Carriage — 2.0-MB MP3

Faster then fairies, faster than witches,
Bridges and houses, hedges and ditches;
And charging along like troops in a battle,
All through the meadows the horses and cattle:
All of the sights of the hill and the plain
Fly as thick as driving rain;
And ever again, in the wink of an eye,
Painted stations whistle by.

Here is a child who clambers and scrambles,
All by himself and gathering brambles;
Here is a tramp who stands and gazes;
And there is the green for stringing the daisies!
Here is a cart run away in the road
Lumping along with man and load;
And here is a mill and there is a river:
Each a glimpse and gone forever!

Shadow March — 4.6-MB MP3

All 'round the house is the jet-black night;
It stares through the window pane;
It crawls in the corners, hiding from the light,
And it moves with the moving flame.

Now my little heart goes a beating like a drum,
With the Bogie in my hair,
And all around the candle the crooked shadows come,
And go marching along up the stair.

The shadow of the balusters, the shadow of the lamp,
The shadow of the child that goes to bed&
All the wicked shadows coming, tramp, tramp, tramp,
With the black night overhead.