Nathan McAdam, The Conqueror Worm 

I chose to compose in response to Cipriano de Rore’s O Sonno, the setting of a sonnet by Giovanni della Casa (1503–1556), the Italian poet and diplomat. The poem expresses a longing for sleep—an aching desire for oblivion and escape from worldly troubles, serving as a metaphor for death. Rore’s musical rendering is dark yet full of ambiguity: the piece halts, then begins again and again. He leaves the ultimate fate of his subject open to interpretation. Does the sleeper ever find rest?

For my piece, I wanted a text that was not ambiguous but absolute in its cynicism: Edgar Allan Poe’s The Conqueror Worm (1842). In Poe’s vision, human life is a kind of grotesque theater in which death is the true hero. The “worm” becomes a symbol of mortality, devouring all human action and achievement. My composition draws from O Sonno musically, incorporating quotation as well as references to other works, including a Brahms piano Intermezzo. I reshaped Poe’s text, reordering its lines to tell the story I wanted to tell—without, I hope, losing its meaning.

Ethan Watts, Dead Love 

I chose to compose in response to Monteverdi’s madrigal Darà la Notte il Sol, whose text describes the solitary pain of mourning. The poem, by the Italian bishop Scipione Agnello (1586–1653), appears to draw on Greek mythology, referencing Glaucus—the once-mortal fisherman turned sea god—who weeps an ocean of tears at his lover’s tomb. “The sun will light the earth by night and the moon by day,” Agnello writes, “before Glaucus will cease to kiss, to honor this breast which was the nest of love, now crushed by the weighty tomb.” 

For my piece, I chose the poem Dead Love by Pulitzer Prize–winning poet Sara Teasdale (1884–1933), whose work I first encountered through Ēriks Ešenvalds’s setting of Stars. Teasdale, who suffered from crippling anxiety, questioned her strict religious upbringing. In contrast to Agnello’s emotive Glaucus, her poem conveys a profound grief and isolation, where the heart grows silent as God gives love—and then takes it away. Her language is direct and unadorned; her tone, quietly accusatory. 

My setting unfolds in three sections that mirror Darà la Notte il Sol, following its shifts in texture while expanding upon and commenting on its musical ideas. Teasdale writes, “I cannot weep, I cannot pray / My heart has very silent grown,” and I sought to reflect this stillness, offering a deliberate contrast to Monteverdi’s outpouring of sorrow. From the outset, I knew how I wanted the piece to end: by subverting the quintessentially Renaissance cadence. I push the soprano line downward, leaving the work unresolved. This unsettled conclusion mirrors the nature of my own questions and doubts about the role of the divine in human suffering.