“Reality is an Activity of the Most August Imagination” for soprano and piano was written in 1977 and originally was intended to be half of a song cycle based on two poems of Wallace Stevens. The music to the other song, “The Poems of Our Climate” has been written and revised many times, but, to my mind, it is incomplete.

The form of the music is an athematic arch suggested by the form as well as the content of the poem. I think the poem is about natural light and its relationship to human feeling. In simple terms, I wanted the music to act as fireworks going up, reaching a brilliant apogee, and then dissolving into darkness. This, like many of Stevens’s poems, seems to begin in the real and end in the imagination and I tried to make the music correspond on every level to the demands of the poetry. The work concludes with an almost unrecognizable restatement of the first vocal phrase.