Edgar Allan Poe has long been considered one of the great writers in Gothic literature. His works, as he himself suggested in his essay “The Philosophy of Composition,” are intended to strike a unique balance between mainstream appeal and higher literary craft. In many ways, my goals as a composer are similar, not just in mitigating this often tenuous dynamic, but also in tapping into powerful emotional states. Poe is a master at creating moods, for instantly drawing the reader into his dynamic worlds. Many of his works spend a significant amount of time, sometimes paragraph upon paragraph as in the opening to The Fall of the House of Usher, simply detailing his specific vision of the story’s tenor. In this piece, I was interested in musically depicting the imagery, which Poe so eloquently writes. I have chosen three of Poe’s short stories: The Black Cat, The Pit and the Pendulum, and The Fall of the House of Usher. In each movement, I deliberately avoid any programmatic connection to the story, that is to say specific events in the music do not coincide with any actual depiction of an event within the intended story. Rather this piece examines and details the specific tone of each story. Midnight Drearies: Three Moods on Edgar Allan Poe was written for Dan Welcher and the University of Texas New Music Ensemble. / text

Among the psychological interpretations of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Black Cat,” trauma theory has yet to make an appearance. However, the confessional nature of the story shifts—via a trauma reading—from an attempt by the narrator to ease his guilt to his attempt to understand what happened to him. The narrator’s murder of his wife traumatized him, causing erasures in the timeline and several forms of dissociation. These erasures and dissociations cause an uncanny effect within the story, which occurs as the past, present, and future are conflated and as the narrator’s mind is both known and hidden. The narrator’s tale is an attempt at working through his trauma to come to an understanding and acceptance of the events. However, the unclear timeline—both how much time has passed since his wife’s death and the passage of time in the story—suggests that the narrator does not have enough critical distance from the events, so telling his tale becomes a form of reliving that does not relieve the confusion he experiences. Ultimately, the narrator’s confession does not provide the understanding he hopes for, which places the burden of creating an understanding of the story on the individual reader.