What Is Beauty, Then?

for SSATB chorus

1976

3.5 minutes

Text: Christopher Marlowe

Commission: Crescent City Chamber Choir

Premiere: Crescent City Chamber Choir
St. Stephen's Church, New Orleans, LA
Nov 21, 1976

Publisher: Lawson-Gould

Composer Notes: I have loved the rhetorical beauty of English Renaissance language (Shakespeare, Marlowe, Robert Herrick, The Book of Common Prayer, The King James Bible, and so on) ever since I was a teenager. I sang in a madrigal group as an undergraduate, and this work reveals affinities with the English madrigalists.