Cody Horne
Recital
April 21st 2025
Indiana University
Merrill Recital Hall @ 6:00 PM
Program
Aftermath composed by Ned Rorem
The Drum By various Poets
Tygers of Wrath
The Fury of Aerial Bombardment
The Park
Sonnet LXIV
On his Seventy-Fifth Birthday
Grief
Remorse for Any Death
Losses
Then
Fathers composed by Lori Laitman
Don’t Cry, fragment 1 By various Poets
You, Father
Don’t Cry, fragment 2
Last Night I Dreamt
Don’t Cry, fragment 3
I Saw My Father Drowning
Don’t Cry
War Scenes composed by Ned Rorem
A Night Battle Words by Walt Whitman
A Specimen Case
An Incident
Inauguration Ball
The Real War Will Never Get in the Books
Musicians
Cody Horne Vocalist
Albert Newberry Pianist
Unknown Violin
Unknown Cello
Program Notes
“Indeed, the future will judge us, as it always judges the past, by
our art more than by our armies—by construction more than by
destruction. The art, no matter its theme or language, by
definition reflects the time: a waltz in a moment of tragedy, or a
dirge during prosperity, may come into focus only a century
later.”
Ned Rorem (Winter of 2001-02)
This quote inspired me to find and perform pieces written
around conflict to help bring more light to their subjects, and to
let the music speak of the material.
Each cycle has a different purpose:
Aftermath
This cycle was written with the intention of the music speaking
for itself, about itself. Reflecting the time and tribulations that
the poets and writers experienced. This music is meant to help
the you reflect on your own lives and what experiences have
helped shape them.
Fathers
This cycle focuses on the parent-child bond that was altered by
the holocaust. Ranasinghe's father was murdered by the Nazis
and David Vogel was arrested by the Nazis and perished at
Auschwitz. This is a very dark and somber subject. However, I
hope it inspires you to look at your own relationships with your
parents and children, to consider what they are and what they
could be.
War Scenes
This cycle is meant to help shine a light on what our veterans
experienced and battle with daily in their minds. I am very
supportive of veteran help efforts and want to help them as
much as I can. There is a great issue of veteran mental health
and suicide that needs to be addressed, and I hope this set helps
raise awareness about this on going tragedy.
Aftermath
The Drum
words by John Scott of Amwell
I hate that drum’s discordant sound,
Parading round, and round, and round:
To thoughtless youth it pleasure yields,
And lures from cities and from fields,
To sell their liberty for charms
Of tawdry lace, and glittering arms;
And when Ambition’s voice commands,
To march, and fight, and fall, in foreign lands.
I hate that drum’s discordant sound,
Parading round, and round, and round;
To me it talks of ravag’d plains,
And burning towns, and ruin’d swains,
And mangled limbs, and dying groans,
And widows’ tears, and orphans’ moans;
And all that Misery’s hand bestows,
To fill the catalogue of human woes.
Tygers of Wrath
Words by William Blake, A.E. Housman, John Marston, and
Matthew Arnold
The tigers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction.
There is no spark of reason in the world
And all is raked in ashy heaps of beastliness.
We for a certainty are not the first
Have sat in taverns while the tempest hurled
Their hopeful plans to emptiness, and cursed
Whatever brute and blackguard made the world.
This is not what man hates,
Yet he can curse but this.
Harsh Gods and hostile Fates
And dreams: this only is.
The Fury of Aerial Bombardment
Words by Richard Eberhart
You would think the fury of aerial bombardment
Would rouse God to relent; the infinite spaces
Are still silent. He looks on shock-pried faces.
History, even, does not know what is meant.
You would feel that after so many centuries
God would give man to repent; yet he can kill
As Cain could, but with multitudinous will,
No farther advanced than in his ancient furies
Was man made stupid to see his own stupidity?
Is God by definition indifferent, beyond us all?
Is the eternal truth man’s fighting soul
Wherein the Beast ravens in its own avidity?
Of Van Wettering I speak, and Averill,
Names on a list, whose faces I do not recall
But they are gone to early death, who late in school
Distinguished the belt feed lever from the belt holding pawl.
The Park
Words by John Hollander
Here on these benches in the wan sun
Ancient couples sit and wait for death.
They absorb what they can of the wide
Field of uncaring life around them.
I shall never have grown into old
Winter with you now: has time robbed me
Of waiting with you here, or spared me?
Sonnet LXIV
Words by William Shakespeare
When I have seen by Time’s fell hand defaced
The rich proud cost of outworn buried age;
When sometime lofty towers I see down-razed
And brass eternal slave to mortal rage;
When I have seen the hungry ocean gain
Advantage on the kingdom of the shore,
And the firm soil win of the watery main,
Increasing store with loss and loss with store;
When I have seen such interchange of state,
Or state itself confounded to decay;
Ruin hath taught me thus to ruminate,
That Time will come and take my love away.
This thought is as a death, which cannot choose
But weep to have that which it fears to lose.
On His Seventy-Fifth Birthday
Words by Walter Savage Landor
I strove with none; for none was worth my strife,
Nature I loved, and next to Nature, Art;
I warmed both hands before the fire of life,
It sinks, and I am ready to depart.
Grief
Words by Elizabeth Barrett Browning
I tell you, hopeless grief is passionless;
That only men incredulous of despair,
Half-taught in anguish, through the midnight air
Beat upward to God’s throne in loud access
Of shrieking and reproach. Full desertness 5
In souls as countries lieth silent-bare
Under the blanching, vertical eye-glare
Of the absolute Heavens. Deep-hearted man, express
Grief for thy Dead in silence like to death—
Most like a monumental statue set 10
In everlasting watch and moveless woe
Till itself crumble to the dust beneath.
Touch it; the marble eyelids are not wet:
If it could weep, it could arise and go.
Losses
Words by Randall Jarrell
It was not dying: everybody died.
It was not dying: we had died before
In the routine crashes—and our fields
Called up the papers, wrote home to our folks,
And the rates rose, all because of us.
We died on the wrong page of the almanac,
Scattered on mountains fifty miles away;
Diving on haystacks, fighting with a friend,
We blazed up on the lines we never saw.
We died like aunts or pets or foreigners.
(When we left high school nothing else had died
For us to figure we had died like.)
In our new planes, with our new crews, we bombed
The ranges by the desert or the shore,
Fired at towed targets, waited for our scores—
And turned into replacements and woke up
One morning, over England, operational.
It wasn’t different: but if we died
It was not an accident but a mistake
(But an easy one for anyone to make).
We read our mail and counted up our missions—
In bombers named for girls, we burned
The cities we had learned about in school—
Till our lives wore out; our bodies lay among
The people we had killed and never seen.
When we lasted long enough they gave us medals;
When we died they said, “Our casualties were low.”
They said, “here are the maps”; we burned the cities.
It was not dying—no, not ever dying;
But the night I died I dreamed that I was dead,
And the cities said to me: “Why are you dying?
We are satisfied, if you are; but why did I die?”
Then
Words by Muriel Rukeyser
When I am dead, even then,
I will still love you, I will wait in these poems,
When I am dead, even then
I am still listening to you.
I will still be making poems for you
out of silence;
silence will be falling into that silence,
it is building music.
Fathers
Fragment 1
By Anne Ranasinghe
Don’t Cry because the pot is broken it had long been cracked.
Don’t Cry
You, Father
By Anne Ranasinghe
You, Father, stand in your heavy dark coat Against the winter
tree. Ice on the lake, And two small ducks that were caught
afloat By winter, frozen. The sun is behind me as I take This
photograph, and what I make Is a last sad record, though I could
not have known. The sun behind me is cold and white And
projects my elongated shadow. It falls black between us, yet lies
so light On the innocent, powdery snow. You do not smile, is the
sun in your eyes? Or, now I wonder, could you have known?
Fragment 2
By Anne Ranasinghe
Don’t cry Because the pot is broken It had long been cracked.
But gather the shards Dig a deep hole And bury them.
Don’t Cry
Last Night I Dreamt
By Anne Ranasinghe
Last night I dreamt back to forgotten And sleeping images of
childhood days. How green the grass upon the swelling hillside
Patched with the dazzling gold of buttercups, The firs stand dark
and tall, still in the midday heat Above the fields of wheat as yet
uncut, How still the murmuring summer’s day How still my
father’s valley. And I am searching up among the trees Alone
among the dark and silent fir trees, And panic growing as I lose
my way And cannot find what I am searching for, Then,
screaming run along the river That moves like molten lead
beneath the willows, Run down the hill, across the bridge and
homewards Towards my father’s house. But when I reach it It is
not there nor any trace of it. I woke. And putting out my hand I
searched for you, Put out my hand and searched the empty night
Vibrating only with the hollow echo The hollow echo of my
waking dream.
Fragment 3
By Anne Ranasinghe
Don’t cry Because the pot is broken It had long been cracked.
But gather the shards Dig a deep hole and bury them. And the
rain will smoothen the disturbed earth, The sun will bake, and
wind trace New landmarks.
Don’t Cry
I Saw My Father Drowning
By David Vogel
I saw my father drowning in surging days. His weak hand gave a
last white flutter in the distance, and he was gone. I kept on
alone Along the shore, A boy still, with small, thin legs, and
have grown as far as this. And now I am my father, and all those
waves Have broken over me, And left my soul numb. But all I
held dear Have gone into the wilderness And I can stretch out a
hand to no one. I am happy to rest in the black cradle of night,
Under the sky’s canopy
Don’t Cry
By Anne Ranasinghe
Don’t cry Because the pot is broken It had long been cracked.
But gather the shards Dig a deep hole And bury them. And the
rain will smoothen The disturbed earth, The sun will bake, and
wind trace New landmarks Till finally you won’t remember
Even the place...
War Scenes
A Night Battle
By Walt Whitman
What scene is this? Is this indeed humanity, these butchers’
shambles? There they lie, in an open space in the woods,
300 poor fellows, the groans and screams,
mixed with the fresh scent of the night,
that slaughter-house! O well it is their mothers, cannot see them
Some have their legs blown off, some bullets through the breast,
some indescribably horrid wounds in the face or head, all
mutilated, sickening, torn, gouged out.
some mere boys, they take their turns with
the rest, such is the camp of the wounded
while over all the clear, large moon comes out at times softly,
amid the crack and crash and yelling sounds, the clear-obscure
up there, those buoyant upper oceans, a few large placid stars
beyond, coming languidly out, and disappearing the melancholy,
draperied night around. And there, upon the roads, and in those
woods, that contest, never one more desperate in any age or land
What history, can ever give, for who can know, the mad,
determined tussle of the armies, who knows the many conflicts
in flashing-moon beamed woods, the writhing squads, the cries,
the din, the distant cannon, the cheers and calls and threats and
awful music of the oaths, the indescribable mix, the officers’
orders, the devils fully roused in human hearts, the strong shout,
Charge, men, charge
And still again the moonlight pouring
silvery soft its radiant patches overall. Who paint the scene, the
sudden partial panic of the afternoon, at dusk?
A Specimen Case
By Walt Whitman
Poor youth, so handsome, athletic, with profuse shining hair.
One time as I sat looking at him while he lay asleep, he
suddenly, without the least start, awakened, opened his eyes,
gave me a long steady look, turning his face very slightly
to gaze easier, one long, clear, silent look, a slight sigh,
then turned back and went into his doze again. Little he knew,
poor death-stricken boy, the heart of the stranger that hovered
near.
An Incident
By Walt Whitman
In one of the fights before Atlanta, a rebel soldier, of large size,
evidently a young man, was mortally wounded, top of the head,
so that the brains partially exuded. He lived three days, lying on
his back on the spot where he first dropped. He dug with his heel
in the ground during that time a hole big enough to put in a
couple of ordinary knapsacks. He just lay there in the open air,
and with little intermission kept his heel going night and day.
Some of our soldiers then moved him to a house, but he died in
a few minutes.
Inauguration Ball
By Walt Whitman
At the dance and supper room, I could not help thinking
what a different scene they presented to my view a while since.
Filled with a crowded mess of the worst wounded of the war.
Tonight, beautiful women, perfumes, the violin’s sweetness,
the polka and the waltz. There the amputation, the blue face, the
groan, the glassy eye of the dying, the clouted rag, the odor of
blood and many a mother’s son amid strangers passing away
untended there.
The Real War Will Never Get in the Books
By Walt Whitman
And so good-bye to the war. I know not how it may have been,
to others, to me, the main interest was in the rank and file of the
armies, both sides, and even the dead on the field. To me the
points illustrating the latent personal character of American
young were of more significance even than the political interests
involved.
Future years will never know the seething hell of countless
minor scenes. The real war will never get in the books. Perhaps,
must not and should not be. The whole land, North and South,
was one vast hospital, a greater like life’s than the few
distortions ever told . Think how much, and of importance, will
be has already been, buried in the grave.
Thank You For Coming!!
