choral

Composer's note: Water Ruminations is a setting of six poems by the thirteenth-century poet Rumi, in English translations from the Persian by Coleman Barks, for double choir and organ.

The poetry sings of literal and spiritual connections between water and sky, a drop of water and human life, flowing water and love, drinking water and its container, the giddiness of spring and rolling seas, and the ocean’s gifts and singing. Its images, from 800 years ago, speak to us with both vivid immediacy and transcendence.

The idea for the piece originated with the Mellon Elemental Arts Initiative, which proposed funding activities that would involve students in artistic experience and creation over the next four years, centered around the uniting theme of the four classical elements of Water, Earth, Air, and Fire. This year’s theme being water, the poems set here seemed ideal. The project brings together our own Pomona College Choir, Donna M. Di Grazia, conductor and the professional Millennium Consort Singers, Martin Neary, conductor, for a week of rehearsing, performing, and recording. Water Ruminations is gratefully dedicated to the two choirs and their conductors.

Commissioned by Simsbury Public Schools, Silent Moon was composed in 2007 for SSAA and piano. The text, collected from a number of different poems by Giacomo Leopardi (1798-1837) where the moon appears prominently, were adapted from the originals in Italian.

Calvino says it best: "As soon as the moon appears in poetry, it brings with it a sensation of lightness, suspension, a silent calm enchantment." "For the miraculous thing about [Leopardi's] poetry is that he simply takes the weight out of language, to the point that it resembles moonlight. The appearances of the moon in his poetry do not take up many lines, but they are enough to shed the light of the moon on the whole poem, or else to project upon it the shadow of its absence.

It is the sensation of lightness, of suspension and transparency that I was after in adapting and setting Leopardi's poetry in Silent Moon. 

Work for a capella SSSSAAAA chorus. The work uses single words to describe outdoor scenes; the story line is that of an explorer seeing our planet for the first time. Some text used also, from the same poem used by Arnold Schoenberg in his Second String Quartet.