Some Favored Nook
Composed and workshopped during Nathan’s residencies at the Copland House, Yellow Barn and the American Academy in Rome, Some Favored Nook weaves together passages from Dickinson’s poetry and her exchange with Higginson, yielding a three-part song cycle broken into 15 tracks. Featured on the album are soprano Tony Arnold, baritone William Sharp, and pianist Seth Knopp, the same artists who have brought the work to life in public performances. The work’s title derives from a line by Higginson, who broods on the constraints that stifled women artists of his time, comparing their work to a plant permitted to thrive only in “some favored nook,” and not in the broader soil of a society not yet ready to appreciate it.
Some Favored Nook Tracklist
Eric Nathan – Some Favored Nook (2019)
Part I
1. To tell me what is true? [4:49]
2. The nearest dream recedes unrealized [2:45]
3. Could you tell me how to grow? [3:01]
4. They shut me up in Prose [3:53]
5. My barefoot rank is better [2:10]
Part II
6. To see if we were growing [3:19]
7. War feels to me an oblique place [1:58]
8. There suddenly arose [2:45]
9. Emancipation [2:47]
10. All sounds ceased [2:54]
11. There came a wind like a bugle [1:54]
12. Attending to the wounded [2:18]
13. That shamed the nation [2:01]
Part III
14. These are my introduction [5:51]
15. My Wars are laid away in Books / No Prisoner be [3:23]