Duration: ca. 10 minutes
Text: Antiphon for Eastertide, adapted from Ezekiel 47:1–12; Des Baches Wiegenlied (Lullaby of the Brooks) from Die Schone Müllerin by Wilhelm Müller
Publisher: C. F. Peters Corporation, Edition Peters 67487
God hath sent me to sea for pearls, subtitled “a Canticle for Viola and Piano” is dedicated to its first performers, violist Lois Martin and pianist David Holzman, and takes as its points of departure note only this haunting line from Smart’s wonderfully ecstatic and extravagantly wrought doxology (written while he was confined to an insane asylum), but the “submerged horn call” figure from Franz Schubert’s famous setting of the Müller poem quoted above, as well as the melody of the antiphon Vidi aquam. The work is in three major sections, the first and third of which are in the basic tempo of a lullaby or slow siciliana, with a more violent and active section coming between them, which ultimately recapitulates in a transformed manner the material of the beginning of the work.