Songs for the Wilderness

for Voice

Duration: 16:00 min.

Text: None

Program Notes:

I have long wanted to compose a song cycle using texts by Cynthia Erlandson. The first time I remember hearing Cindy’s poetry was when she joined the Trans-Pacific Trio for a joint album release/book release party in 2021. Afterward, I incorporated several of her poems into my Lenten Meditations concerts in 2022 and 2023, and a brief vacation visiting a friend in January of 2024 provided the perfect time to start this song cycle. I eventually settled on the six poems presented here because of the ability to draw connections between the first three and the last three and still to create an overall narrative through the structure. The first two songs present basic problems of life - gluttonous appetites and death. The next two songs continue to present similar problems, but petition God for help in overcoming them; although the songs generally parallel each other, the final line of the second suggests a more hopeful outcome than does the first. The final two songs provide responses to the first two with increasingly concrete hope of how God answers the problem of death by swallowing it in life and the problem of gluttony with true feasting. In my initial drafts, I focused heavily on text painting through mode, extended techniques, and strictness of tempo, which resulted in a very fluid, meditative feeling in most of the pieces. Cindy thankfully noticed that my approach had obscured the metre and rhyme of most of the original poems! Wanting to highlight rather than obscure what Cindy had laboured so hard to achieve, I used most of the same pitch material but provided concrete rhythmic values that would result in the main rhymes occurring at the same point in each phrase. Between the otherwise uneven distribution of syllables throughout the phrase and the melismatic nature of the material, it also retained its fluid quality. I hope that the resulting songs enable you to reflect on how you are invited to be transformed and enter into ultimate beauty, fullness, and life.