Voicing (2008) 18'
Premiere:
April 6, 2008, Sudler Hall, Yale University with Robert Bolyard singing baritone, Yoshi Onishi playing clarinet, Ezra Seltzer playing cello, and Brett Brown playing piano
Text:
Poems by Federico Garcia Lorca in English translations by Catherine Brown, Cola Franzen, Christopher Mauer, Jerome Rothenberg, Robin Skelton, and Alan S. Trueblood.
Movements:
1. Street of Mutes (Listen - 4.78MB .MP3)
2. Acacia (Listen - 2.04MB .MP3)
3. The Mute Boy (Listen - 2.32MB .MP3)
4. Only Instruments (Listen - 1MB .MP3)
5. Hour of Stars (Listen - 5.97MB .MP3)
6. Capriccio ( Listen - 1.03MB . MP3)
7. Snail (Listen - 3.18MB .MP3)
8. Replica (Listen - 2.77MB .MP3)
9. The Cry (Listen - 3.45MB . MP3)
10. Nocturne in Outline (Listen - 2.93MB .MP3)
11. Voices (Listen - 8.20MB . MP3)
Voicing interweaves two narratives, one of a stolen and regained voice taken away by the king of the crickets and returned in a snail shell, and the other of the moon's stem being cut down and then a ladder reaching to the moon being rebuilt. The even numbered movements, settings of short poems about the moon, rework the same musical materials, deconstructing the ephemeral musical enigma of the fourth movement into duets between the singer and each instrumentalist in the second, sixth, and eighth movements. The musical materials are then reassembled through a concocted potion in movement ten. The song cycle has a bittersweet conclusion as the final movement reveals the recovered voice to be contorted by a jumble of instrumental voices.