The Way I Saw Them Turning

for voice, flute, viola, and piano (25 minutes)

Let’s talk poetry for a second. I don’t consider myself a particularly good lyricist or a particularly good poet; I read a ton of poetry and it’s one of my favorite art forms, I know a lot about it, I’ve studied it, I write it, but text-setting presents a distinct problem that I don’t think enough composers really think about. That is, the fact that poetry is usually not written with any sort of intention to be set as song in the first place, especially in a contemporary setting. Sometimes the medium just doesn’t really work or we have to find ways of cutting things, perhaps fighting contrivances, etc., because the transition from poem to lyrics is often one dealing with a lot of compromises, and one dealing with a lot of contrivances in the first place. Now, there’s isn’t necessarily nothing wrong with contrivances –we are talking about a creative art form here– but sometimes these can be at the sacrifice of the poem, especially if there is a necessity to completely re-render the whole thing full-sail.

Because most of the poetry that’s in the public domain has clear metric flow, which my music does not, there are a lot of difficulties for me in setting old poetry, and the contemporary poetry I’m interested in usually won’t work as text, unless I break the text apart anyway, it starts to feel like I’m wrangling the words rather than creating some unity. In any case, I really struggle to find text written by others that I feel confident in setting in the first place, so I end up writing a lot of lyrics myself, and often these lyrics are rather abstract or fragmented.

I think it’s really difficult to divorce the human voice from any sort of expressivity, so I’m honestly not particularly interested in using text for the human voice that doesn’t have that expressive quality in there somewhere (even just for myself). That’s not to say that one could not divorce the voice from expression at all, but it’s not a methodology that I find particularly compelling or one that I think I would be particularly successful at either. Because of that, I tend to write my own text and my own lyrics, even if they are rather abstract, but always in an expressive way, with an intended poetic message in mind.

In other words: this piece is about something. Not that I’ll tell you what it’s about actually but it is there, beyond being about the music itself or the technique of how I wrote it. Maybe I’m just like that with my vocal work.

But having complete control over my poetry and the pitches, etc. opened creative doors that allowed me to write the text and the music in tandem and reconcile how the two relate to each other, but also how these things relate to form in the overall structure of the piece.

 I don’t want to give it all away in the program note, as far as spoilers ago, but the arpeggiated pattern is a construction of harmonic material and the fragmentation of the work all builds on top of each other; there’s some sort of nested structure, or maybe even a fractal structure (although I would probably never say that this piece is a fractal in itself in any sense). However, when this all comes together, there is a jarring moment: awakening from a daydream, maybe, and through all of this floating, the arrival point of a new arpeggio, going up, all links back in the material that we’ve already heard as well as the poetic suggestion from the text.

I am willing to admit that all of this may be extremely esoteric or opaque, and that nobody else might be able to hear it, but these are the things are went into making this piece. Even if it feels like we’re scrabbling to come up with “reasons” why we do things, these are the things that go into realizing a project when you have an idea: sometimes the methodology doesn’t always make sense and I think a lot of our modernist notions of construction and idea can take away from the idea of linear listening and hearing.

How these structures and patterns can be built on top of each other, but have a flow from one another? I guess we can call this “organic,” some will call this “stream of consciousness,” and sometimes people will call it boring and formlessness. Whatever you call it, the formalist element of this piece is based on that arpeggiation and the nested structure of things –up into a certain point – and at the same time, finding ways of being expressive, vulnerable, emotional, even abstractly or full of contrivances.