i. your little voice... ii. a wind has blown the rain away...
iii. love is more thicker than forget...

your little voice...(2009) is a short song cycle based on three contrasting E.E. Cummings poems. The outer movements, "your little voice..." and "love is more thicker than forget," were originally scored for soprano and woodwinds in one of my earliest pieces, two e.e. cummings poems (2006). They are here revised and arranged for piano at the request of Susanna Su, who premiered the original settings. In addition to these movements, the middle of the cycle contains a setting of "a wind has blown the rain away." Having been written almost five years after the other movements, this setting is perhaps somewhat stylistically different from the rest; still the cycle still stands as a unified set because of the inherent thematic similarities of the chosen texts.
In "your little voice/ Over the wires came leaping," Cummings is describing the hysteria of falling in love. The musical setting of this text aims to reflect the poem?s many contrasting moods and emotional trajectories which range from euphoric to chaotic to anxious to love-struck to reflective. In "a wind has blown the rain away," Cummings describes the changing of the seasons and he addresses the topics of love, death, and the passage of time. The music in the second movement is written in different sections to respond to these themes, while a gusting wind in the piano constantly resurfaces as a musical thread that ties the movement together. "Love is more thicker than forget," is comprised of four strophic stanzas that each describe love as perplexing and paradoxical. The musical form reflects this construction: the soprano starts alone, and as each subsequent stanza begins, the piano plays the same musical material which accompanied the prior stanza. Setting to music Cummings's final image of the sky, the work ends reflectively on a gentle major chord. - D.T.

duration 13'00"

Two performance scores: $24.95 Paper; $16.95 Digital

Catalogue No. 07009