Song of the Dying Amazon

By Kay Gardner
Lyrics by Shirley Tannenbaum

A piece specially commissioned by the chorus
and conducted by the composer
at Wild Women Don't Get the Blues, our fall 1997 concert

About the Composer

In Memoriam Kay Gardner passed away on August 28, 2002 We deeply mourn her loss as we celebrate her extraordinary, joyful life.
	[Notes written for the program book in fall 1997]: At age four, Kay Gardner performed her first composition. Her first large work was a full-length musical, Tcartsba, written as a teenager while a music student at the University of Michigan. After eleven years of marriage and children, she returned to the State University of New York at Stony Brook, where she studied flute with Samuel Baron and Jean-Pierre Rampal.
In 1974, after receiving her M.Mus. degree, she began composing again and, active in the women's movement, released her earliest compositions on women-owned record labels. To date Kay has thirteen recordings of original compositions, the most well-known of which are Mooncircles (Urana Records), A Rainbow Path and her oratorio Ouroboros: Seasons of Life (Ladyslipper Records). An authority on the healing properties of music, Kay is the author of Sounding the Inner Landscape: Music as Medicine (Element Books, London), and will soon release a six-cassette teaching series, Music as Medicine (Sounds True, Boulder). Since 1976, Kay has traveled throughout the world as a composer / performer and as leader of workshops on music and healing. Today, she spends less time on the road and more time composing, receiving commissions from performance groups nationwide. Her orchestral works Rainforest, Quiet Harbor, and The Rising Sun have been performed by symphonies in California, Texas, Missouri, Maine, Minnesota, Michigan, Washington, DC, Indiana, Illinois, and England. At home in Maine, Kay leads the Bangor women's chorus, Women with Wings, is Music Director of the Unitarian-Universalist Church of Bangor, and is an active member of the Maine Composers' Forum. The winner of numerous awards, grants, and prizes, in May, 1997, Kay Gardner was awarded an honorary Doctor of Fine Arts degree from the University of Maine. In 1983, she received Boston's Oasis Award for the "Lesbian tradition of pride, humor, and integrity." Kay lives with her partner of nineteen years on the coast of Maine (in Stonington), where they share a home, three cats, three fish, and a parakeet, and run a rooming house for womyn. She has researched her ancestors in her motherline back to the Mayflower. Her favorite is Deborah Sampson, who fought in the Revolutionary War disguised as a man. About the Piece Shirley T. is the Executive Director of Survivors, the domestic violence and sexual assault program in Adams County. She sings soprano two in the chorus, and has served on the board of directors. She has been writing poetry since her childhood. Song of the Dying Amazon was born many years ago, at a difficult time in her life. It has always been a favorite of her partner, Susan S. In the summer of 1996, Susan won a raffle. She decided to fulfill a dream, and commission Kay Gardner to put that poem to music for the Central Pennsylvania Womyn's Chorus. She was sure Kay was the right woman for the job. Much of her music is written in pentatonic scales that evoke the ancient music of the eastern Mediterranean, land of the Amazons, and Kay already had considerable experience writing women's choral music. Kay decided to write the piece in what mainstream musicologists now call the Mixolydian mode, and she calls the "Lesbian" mode, because of its origin on the island of Lesbos, during the age of Sappho. Chapter VI, Melody: Heart and Soul of Music, in Kay's book, Sounding the Inner Landscape: The Healing Power of Music, explores scales, modes, and ragas (terms that are synonymous). She points out that the Lesbian mode survives today in the music of Scotland and Ireland as well as in the songs of American Appalachia. It was used often in religious chants during the Middle Ages, for open and joyful music. She characterizes it as a healing mode. Shirley, Kay, and Susan

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