Programme Notes

In 2021/22, I and the soprano Rebecca Madden collaborated together to make this song for a recital that she was planning. The theme for the recital as a whole was spurned love and doomed relationships, and in the pursuit of a suitable text, I came across the work of Alice Dunbar-Nelson.

Alice Dunbar-Nelson was an American Poet who would later be part of the Harlem Renaissance in the United States: a veritable explosion of art and culture in Harlem, New York during the 1920s. This poet was no stranger to turbulent relationships, having survived horrific domestic abuse from her first husband, and a divorce from her second.

The poem "If I had known" was written as part of the 1895 collection "Violets and other tales" while Dunbar-Nelson was moving between New Orleans and Boston, living under her unmarried name of Alice Ruth Moore. Written before her marriage to Paul Laurence Dunbar, it describes a dejected persona wondering what they would have done if they'd known the "impotence of love" - it turned out to be tragically prophetic of her relationship with Dunbar, who physically abused her many times before she left him.

Without wishing to go into detail, and while not entirely like the experiences of Alice Dunbar Nelson, I have some empathy with what she went through.

The piece was premiered in Summer 2022 in St Alfege's Church Greenwich by Rebecca Madden, accompanied by David Smith.