Three Poems by Herman Melville

Three Poems
by Herman Melville
A novelist of immense fame, Herman Melville wrote a great many poems from 1859 onwards, most of them for himself. In the last thirty years of his life, Melville wrote almost exclusively poetry, which remains little-known to this day.
The three poems used in this score are part of the collection Timoleon and Other Ventures in Minor Verse (1891).
The ravaged villa
Monody
Shelley’s vision
There is an obvious proximity between Herman Melville and Stéphane Mallarmé, in a certain form of hermeticism, a search for the destructuring of language, a resistance to “setting to music”, and both authors’ taste for the organization of form.
It was this last point in particular that guided the choice of the three texts, each of which has its own singular structure, thus guiding the writing of the piece.
This score was commissioned by the Plage musicale festival in Bangor, Belle-Île en mer, and written for the Accroche Note ensemble.
Jean-Louis Agobet