Matilde alle Fontane was commissioned by Big Mouth Society, with Emily Lau as Artistic Director, and written in February and March of 2022. Matilde is a setting of 13 lines close to the end of Canto 28 of Il Purgatorio from Dante’s Divina Commedia. Given the choice to set anything by (or about) Dante, I found myself drawn by the mystic/dream/trance state of the tone in La Commedia. My plan was to read the entire poem in translation until I found an image that stuck out for me, then find and set that bit in Dante’s Italian. While journeying through the loneliness and anguish of Inferno, and traversing Purgatorio, Dante finally reaches a quiet, dark, peaceful, flowing stream. As he starts forward, his guide is suddenly gone, and for the first time since the very beginning of the poem, he is alone. Here he encounters a woman, whom Dante at first thinks is Persephone. At the very end of Il Purgatorio it is revealed that her name is Matilde. She begins to explain where he is (the “nest of humankind”) and she leads him to the source of the stream: two fountains — one named Letè, the other one is Eünoè. It is the final ritual before entering Il Paradiso. At the fountains, you drink from the first one to forget the bad, and you drink from the second one to remember all of the good. In the first and last sections of my setting, we’re looking into the fountains themselves — pools of water, little swirls and eddies inside other swirls, eddies-micro-canons at the unison, and a wash of consonants. In the middle section, there is a change of texture and a shift of focus from being in the water pools, to observing water descending from the fountains. My music is best described as modal. I’m more concerned with modal patterns and linear content than with tonal progression. In Matilde, the pattern shared between the upper voices flows outward, then ebb back to describe the little eddies. I also tend to work with symmetrical rhythmic cycles. For example, in the first 6 stanzas, I use a 223 2222 2222 223 beat structure. This works to describe a ripple, growing from the inside out. — Bill Whitley