Recently, Thomas Adès turned In Darknesse Let Me Dwell into a wonderfully strange piano piece called Darkness Visible.
Scholl, for example, took John Dowland's famous phrase, "In darkness let me dwell," and eased it out of silence with a silken, clarinet-like tone.
What results, "In Darkness Let Me Dwell" (ECM New Series 1697), is a rarity: a crossover project that is both defensible and listenable.
Later, in such through-composed songs as "In Darkness Let Me Dwell" (1610), "From Silent Night" (1612), and "Lasso vita mia" (1612), he introduced the Italian declamatory style, chromaticism, and dissonance; no alternative four-voice versions are given.
Perhaps his greatest, In Darknesse Let Me Dwell, is worth quoting: "In darknesse let me dwell, the ground shall sorrow be,/ The roof, despair to bar all cheerful light from me./ The walls of marble black, that moisten'd still shall weep./ My music, hellish, jarring sounds to banish friendly sleep./ Thus wedded to my woes and bedded to my tomb,/ O, let me living die, til death do come".
"The start of 'In Darkness Let Me Dwell' just goes up a semitone and down again: there's a long 'in,' as if the word 'in' is going into the song, and then it goes up and back down on 'darkness.' I've used this, and it proliferates through the music.
"Let me not... dwell in this bare island by your spell," Prospero asks the audience in the epilogue of "The Tempest".
Before he had kids, he said, "if I had a bad game, it would just eat at me and I would let it dwell...
Let's dwell on this for a minute.
Let us dwell for a moment on the bright side.
Let's dwell on that Inter win a moment longer.
