Exodos for Tony

Back in 2015, I wrote a song cycle set to the alchemically illuminating poetry of James Merrill. My personal favorite song in the cycle was a setting of Merrill’s bleak “Tony: Ending the Life,” a poem that is nominally an elegy for his Greek friend Tony Parigory, who had just died of AIDS, but that is also an auto-elegy in disguise: when he wrote the poem, Merrill was sick with the same disease, though he had disclosed this to almost no one.

The trouble was that my musical setting of “Tony” didn’t want to play nicely with the other songs in the cycle. This song was much longer than the others – nearly ten minutes, as opposed to three or four – and the piano part was fiendishly difficult. It unbalanced the whole cycle. So, even though it was my favorite child, I removed it. “Tony” has lain in a kind of limbo ever since.

I eventually realized that “Tony” never wanted to be just a voice-and-piano piece: even my original piano part was really a sketch for an orchestral version, full of wailing winds and snarling percussion. So I recently orchestrated the piece for chamber orchestra. I’ve also renamed it Exodos for Tony, after the ancient Greek term for an exit song in a play.

I’m grateful to my friend Paul Appleby, the superb tenor who premiered the original Merrill Songs cycle and who has patiently stuck with Tony through its multiple iterations, and also to Gil Rose and the Boston Modern Orchestra Project (BMOP), for whom this definitive chamber-orchestra version was composed.