Three Simple Songs

Three Simple Songs, Two Written in the Early 1960s and the Third in the Mid-1980s The first two of my 'Three Simple Songs' (The River by Sara Teasdale and Lament by Edna St. Vincent Millay) were created when I was in my mid-teens. The River was written on the guitar, with a prominent welling glissando in fourths in the bass. The third of these songs (I Died for Beauty by Emily Dickinson) was written in the mid-1980s. Two of my students at the Uppsala University English Department in Sweden (Susanna Lyne and Anna Lonnebo) kindly performed them at an event arranged by the Department's 'English Society' on November 8, 2000, with Susanna and Anna alternating as soloist and piano accompanist. I hosted the evening and introduced the songs. The three songs are very different in tone and style but are unified by their keen evocations of immense loss and by their spare simplicity. These songs are dedicated, with love, to my wife, Jane Claire Davis MacQueen always in my music.