Fleet as Time (demo version)
"Fleet as Time" by Daniel Elder
Music Copyright ©2020 Daniel Elder
Lyrics Copyright ©2019 L.J. Sysko
Commissioned by the Tower Hill School Concert Choir (2019)
There's something of the divine in the narrator of L.J. Sysko's "This is how the story ends." It's as if this being is writing the very story of time with pen on paper. The "magic lines" of both blood and truth are as one, with the narrator's name written everywhere—yet impossible for us to see. Speaking of "the end" is a constant riddle, first teased as an answer and later withdrawn as an impossibility. The ship of memory sails on the sea of time; both elements intriguingly interwoven in their descriptions as if there's no distinction between the narrator's memory and time itself. Through it all we are invited to take this journey, although we are helpless to intuit its ultimate destination. "Fleet as Time" reinforces the paradox of mortality and divinity by musically juxtaposing the elements of both. As the chorus speaks the narrator's words and lends them a linear, logical, and human perspective brimming with romanticism, the piano accompaniment traverses a much more dizzying path of heights, depths, and turns that lend the story its most cosmic elements. Seething arpeggiations constantly change direction and pattern beneath stable, homophonic vocal lines, as if we are capable of commentary but may never comprehend the narrator's truths. However, Sysko makes one beautiful truth self-evident: Everything written into existence; lands, skies, oceans, and stars, was done in love. Ultimately this memory will carry us into a new age. But, for our part in understanding the journey, time has the answer: "the end eludes even you."