Five Pieces of Love, Death, and Longing

This series of three songs and two dances was written over the course of about a year and was completed in early 2001. Each piece was originally written to stand alone. Over the course of their writing, however, I began to envision them together as a sort of "pageant". This idea extends from the stylistic traditions of the Middle Ages- in one hand, one finds troubadours singing songs of beauty and broken love; -on the other hand, one also finds people amassed in fields dancing "their souls out" to raucous and cathartic music. The set, written for different assemblies of two singers and seven instrumentalists, attempts to convey an intensely psychological glimpse into the human mind’s response to love, death, and longing.

I. "Unquiet Grave" - Written in the spring of 2000 (just after the completion of Modern Love) , this piece has been performed twice at Peabody. Here it is presented in its revised form, with an added viola part and a reduced oboe part. The text is an anonymously written medieval ballad dating from around the 8th century. Two versions survive today- one that is Irish and one that is English (the English version was set by Ralph Vaughn-Williams for baritone and piano). Here the Irish version is used.

II. "Saltarello 2000"- The first of two dance interludes, the primary material of this piece is written in the style of the medieval Italian saltarello. The secondary material pulses in a sort of modern "rock out" (hence the "2000") The end of the piece combines the two ideas to a wild climax.

III. "Often You Say..."- Written in the fall of 2000, this piece sets a poem of Andre Breton, an early twentieth century French writer who was a sort of figurehead of the Surrealist painting movement. His poetry takes a deep interest in the subconscious workings of the brain and sets profound psychological exploration to a backdrop of subconscious references to everyday life. The music attempts to convey the insistent and the simultaneously horrifying and glorious runnings of the mind; there are brief references to subconscious memories expressed through obscure word-painting (ie.- the flute playing the chimes of the New York subway after the line: "for a single embrace in a train corridor") and different recurrences of the main theme.

IV. "Greeting Dance"- This second dance was written in the winter of 2001, and draws material from a viola and cello duet composed in 1998. The music is a graceful but fleeting encounter between two beings; full of hope and intensity but in the end, dissolving into nothingness...

V. "A Pause"- This final movement, written in the early spring of 2001, uses the entire ensemble involved in the piece. The poem was written early in the twentieth century by the Norwegian painter, Edvard Munch, on his painting "Madonna". The lyrics and the music attempt to convey the eternal moment which is contained within any climax and the eternal moment which spans life (birth) and death. The piece ends with a brief and disappearing epilogue for oboe and flute.