Cinnamon Grove: A Suite for the Piano

• Cinnamon Grove is one of Dett’s eight suites for piano. It was published in 1928.¹
• Dett prefaced each of the suite’s four movements with a poetic quotation.²

Movements

1. “Moderato molto grazioso, on lines from ‘The Dream’ by John Donne”³

Dear love, for nothing less than thee
Would I have broke this happy dream.

2. “Adagio cantabile, on lines from Gitanjali by Rabindranath Tagore”⁴

When thou commandest me to sing 
It seems that my heart would break 
With pride; and I look to thy face, 
And tears come to my eyes.

3. “Ritmo moderato e con sentimento: Quasi Gavotte, on lines from ‘Epimetheus’ by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow”⁵

Have I dreamed? Or was it real, 
What I saw as in a vision, 
When to marches hymeneal 
In the land of the Ideal, 
Moved my though o’er fields Elysian?

4. “Allegretto, on lines from a song in Religious Folk Songs of the Negro”⁶

Oh, the winter’ll soon be over, children,  
Yes, my Lord.

1. Christopher Brooks, “Dett, R(obert) Nathaniel,” Grove Music Online (2001), accessed July 16, 2021,  https://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/grovemusic/view/10.1093/gmo/9781561592630.001.0001/omo-9781561592630-e-0000007669. 
2. Nathaniel Dett, Cinnamon Grove: A Suite for Piano (Cincinatti: The John Church Company, 1928). 
3. Ibid., 3-4.
4. Ibid., 11-12.
5. Ibid., 15-16.
6. Ibid., 25-26.