Three Memories For Piano: III - For John

Three Memories For Piano: II - Through The  Glass

Three Memories For Piano :  I - Over The Hill And Far Away

Moon (for solo piano)

Michelle Colton, voice and marimba

Silver

Slowly, silently, now the moon
Walks the night in her silver shoon:
This way, and that, she peers and sees
Silver fruit upon silver trees;
One by one the casements catch
Her beams beneath the silvery thatch;
Couched in his kennel, like a log,
With paws of silver sleeps the dog;
From their shadowy cote the white breasts peep
Of doves in a silver-feathered sleep;
A harvest mouse goes scampering by,
With silver claws and silver eye;
And moveless fish in the water gleam
By silver reeds in a silver stream.

– Walter de la Mare (d. 1956), ‘Silver’ (Peacock Pie, 1913).

Lullabies: Silver (for marimba and voice)

Michelle Colton, voice and marimba

Snow

No breath of wind,
No gleam of sun – 
Still the white snow
Whirls softly down
Twig and bough
And blade and thorn
All in an icy
Quiet, forlorn.
Whispering, rustling,
Through the air
On still and stone,
Roof, – everywhere,
It heaps its powdery
Crystal flakes,
Of every tree
A mountain makes;
'Till pale and faint
At shut of day
Stoops from the West
One wint'ry ray,
And, feathered in fire
Where ghosts the moon,
A robin shrills,
His lonely tune.

– Walter de la Mare (d. 1956), ‘Snow’ (Down-Adown-Derry, 1922).

Lullabies: Snow (for marimba and voice)

Prayer in Anticipation of Parting

Before I ever leave
how I imagine returning to you

Like the chipped edge
of a ceramic dish
fitted perfectly into place. Not a speck
of dust
disturbed in the break

                 Absence is a measurement
calibrated to memory, a scale of units
smaller than the sound of an inhale, only
as wide as the quarry between us
when we lie

                                    clavicle to clavicle
                             hip bone to hip bone

Every breath a coax
                      a grain
                                  of silent mending

		        – Jane Lew

Parting (for soprano and piano)

Michelle Colton, vibraphone
Angela Schwarzkopf, harp
(archival recording) 

check out the studio recording of 'Garden' on Angela Schwarzkopf's album 'detach' on Redshift Records! https://redshiftrecords.org/releases/tk472/

Garden (for vibraphone and harp)

Starve (for string orchestra)

Alexandra Smither, soprano

SOCAN Foundation Awards winner

I stand at the edge of the sea.
The grey sky flames and then grows dark. 
In the gloaming, the surf aches my knees. 
My feet like two fish, below me...
I stand at the edge of the sea.
I stand at the edge. 

(text by Cecilia Livingston)

Two Dreams (for soprano and string quartet)

Alexandra Smither, soprano
Suzy Smith, piano

In this song I imagine Penelope wandering the drafty, echoing ‘empty rooms’ of whatever fortress or palace protected and imprisoned her during her long wait for the return of her husband and her son. The image of a woman, waiting, is common in literature: her act of endurance requires bravery, courage, fortitude, even defiance. The woman who waits suffers, but most often silently; war takes a quiet, dreadful toll on those left behind. Such waiting takes other shapes: the long-distance relationship; the parent of the missing child; the widower. We always wait for those we love, heartstrings stretched taut across miles and years, oceans and continents. Penelope is often praised (condescendingly) for her loyalty, for being a good wife. But how often do we risk imagining her silent battle against her own mind – against hopelessness?

In her day Penelope was just as modern as we are now, so here she sings music that is modern in its hybridity: classical, minimalist, jazz, pop – art song and torch song, for lover and loved.

Penelope (for soprano and piano)

Mckenzie Camp, Gavin Ryan, Jay Sager, Mark Utley (vibraphones)
Bang On a Can Summer Festival 2014

winner, TorQ Percussion Quartet Seminar Composition Competition 2015



Troy (for vibraphone quartet)

noyade: execution by drowning
(NB you may wish to adjust the playback volume on your device, as the recording level is relatively low)

performed by the Fellows of Bang On a Can's 2014 Summer Music Festival, cond. Brad Lubman
(recorded at MassMoCA)

noyade (for large chamber ensemble)

Nothing Can End: I - Child I Long For (for baritone and piano)

Nothing Can End: II - Language Is the House (for baritone and piano)

Nothing Can End: III - What Does a Mother Say to Her Child (for baritone and piano)

Inspired by the art of Alberto Burri. Text by Duncan McFarlane.
Commissioned with the generous support of the Ontario Arts Council.

Thin Edge New Music Collective, 2016
Stacie Dunlop, soprano
Ilana Waniuk, violin
Dobrochna Zubek, cello
Nathan Petitpas, percussion

'Strange Flesh' responds to the art of Alberto Burri, whose sculpture-paintings drew on his experience as a doctor and WWII POW, witness to so many injuries to so much flesh. His canvas becomes skin – sewn, burned, scarred, webbed with melted plastic, gaping in strange vacuoles. In his art, wounds are both fresh, and glimpsed long afterwards; they linger, sutured and bruised. Even the necessary injuries of modern surgery hold terror in their very deliberateness. Even at its most refined, any intrusion on skin is ultimately unnatural, strange. Skin becomes flesh, and then meat, and injured it has an electric hypersensitivity to touch.

'Strange Flesh' falls in two large sections which repeat. Enmeshed in a sonic skin, the singer offers a ghostly narrative of implied violence that also hints at the cycle of the earth’s skin (ashes to ashes, dust to dust: Burri’s last paintings evoke the parched skin of dried mud, cracked, wrinkled, waiting for rain). The singer slowly sheds her agitation; each half of the piece concludes with a gentle C major lullaby – sound that soothes.

Strange Flesh (for soprano, violin, cello, and percussion)

Soundstreams
text by Duncan McFarlane
Zorana Sadiq, soprano
Wesley Shen, piano
Daniel Morphy, percussion

The mathematician and philosopher Hypatia (4th-5th century AD) was one of Alexandria's most respected citizens and teachers. She was murdered during a city-wide political feud. The sensational myth that she was flayed by oystershells comes from a misreading of Socrates Scholasticus; nonetheless, her grisly end – kidnapped, flayed, mutilated, and then burned – stands symbolically alongside the burning of the great library at Alexandria.

she sells seashells by the seashore: 
shells sharp as shards of pots, broken 
roofs of broken homes, and floors, and rooms 
where books from ancient ships once rose; 
oystershells smoothed, shaped, sharpened through
the seas that whisper flesh from bone 
like linen slipping from the skin 
or smoke that slides up from the fires

ashes, ashes: sifting softly 
through the seasalt, to the seafloor; 
so she clothes herself with silence: 
bones of coral, eyes of pearl; 
nothing faded, all arranged into 
something new and strange.

(text by Duncan McFarlane)

Flay (for soprano, piano, and percussion)

Blythe Gaissert, mezzo
Kelly Horsted, piano

The famous sleepwalking scene in Shakespeare’s Macbeth is the context for this piece, and a similar night is imagined here in song. Macbeth's wife is a strange character: she's a dominant force in the play, but then vanishes from the action long before the end. There's such strength of personality there, such commanding ambition, and yet her death is unseen, almost unnoticed. How did her day-to-day life unfold? What of her children, in an age when that defined her role? We hear that she was physically small, slight, and yet her ruthlessness drives the action, the history around her. Did she love her husband? What mix of selfishness, fear, ego, and worry drove her to act as she did?

This scene is generally remembered for Lady Macbeth’s compulsive hand-washing – “Out, damned spot!” and “all the perfumes of Arabia” – but how much more poignant the mention of her nightly letters to her absent husband: written, sealed, and apparently forgotten in her somnambulance, scribbled in the light she now demands at all times. A rich imaginative business – not least because, of course, it is her reading of Macbeth’s earlier letter which fuels her imagination and ambition, driving the mortal engine of the plot. After this famous scene, we never see or hear from her again.

Like the most human characters, she's parodixical, ambiguous: a luminous, tender fragility in her, and yet always a thread of steel. The vocal line should be intensely legato, with the freedom and flexibility of plainchant. Rhythms are only a guide. The sound should be limpid, transclucent, hypnotic: somewhere between chant, lullaby (to whom? herself? her husband? some imagined child?) and lament. 

Each phrase should find chant's push-and-pull of time; let the voice bloom into the resonance of the piano's strange plucked notes – they are, of course, the twinkling candlelight, and the stars. The night is long, and cold, and in her fear she has ordered lights around her always. But in sleep, her eyes closed, she walks in the dark.

... light, a light: I must have light–
light thickens in the eye, grows scarce; 
the stars hide; I have known them all. 
No time, no sleep: the taste of fear. 
  
‘... sleep no more’, you said; a voice cried, 
‘sleep no more’. If I cry out will 
you not hear? Will there be time 
to hold a candle to despair? 
  
Will there be time to murder and 
create? No time, no time: you have 
no time for me, not for a word; 
no time, only tomorrow and– 
  
I must have light: a small white home 
that blooms around this kindled sun, 
this piece of star we keep alive 
with cupp’d hands, wax and string. 
  
Stare in the taper; look away; 
light lingers like a lifted touch: 
a vision strung through dust and dreams 
for all the works and days of hands. 
  
... all blood is ink that stains the skin, 
blank pages flesh without a heart: 
feel no more heat, no chill of grace, 
no more the luxury of eyes. 
  
... wash these small hands, tie on this gown–
no sleep, you told me: sleep no more; 
look not so pale, give me your hand: 
the stars hide, they have known us all. 

				– Duncan McFarlane

Give Me Your Hand (for mezzo soprano and piano)

Tookah Sapper, soprano
Kelly Horsted, piano
text by Duncan McFarlane

Re-imagining coloratura and scat singing, this piece is also an homage to Harold Arlen’s 'Stormy Weather' (lyrics by Ted Koehler), which begins: 

Don't know why there's no sun up in the sky
Stormy weather
Since my man and I ain't together,
Keeps rainin' all the time

It’s a poignant love-song, one that Kalypso – the nymph/demi-god of Homer’s Odyssey – could well have sung. After the storm which shipwrecked him on his way home from Troy to Ithaca (and to his waiting wife, Penelope) Odysseus was swept on to Kalypso’s island, and she held him there (against his will, but not really) for seven years.

Both torch song and art song, Kalypso’s plea is set in a warm, tender, jazz-rich, Chopin-esque language, and there are many musical connections here with Penelope, particularly in both pieces’ middle sections, which reach for something more bare and visionary. Each woman calls out to Odysseus, tries to summon him back to her, and in this moment their music speaks in the same tongue.

Kalypso (for soprano and piano)

Jennifer Goode Cooper, soprano
Kelly Horsted, piano

This piece imagines a scene in which a woman puts herself and her words between a mob and its victim. She too is cornered by the crowd and, surrounded, she turns on them. Her anger is not a hot, hysterical rage or melodramatic chest-beating; instead, it's vicious, ruthless, ice-cold. Whatever has transpired, she's going to give as good as she got before they close in on her. And then (one imagines) brute strength will overcome whatever words echo in the air.

Almost all the singer's phrases sink chromatically from a starting peak, and the accompaniment’s interjections are sharp staccato barks or a low, roiling counterpoint which breaks out into strange chords. There's some sort of slow dance in this piece, some sort of tango of tension between the woman and her attackers.

Your mercy’s nothing: worthless; save it. 
With every second’s twitch you change your minds; 
how soon and easy you forget your fears, 
the desperate hungers in the hollows 
of your bodies, the press of bones inside 
your sliding skin: sliding as easily as lies, 
that slip between your lips like breath and bile. 
You jig and you spin and you lisp, and you 
pseudonym your sins, and your desires 
are a sick man’s thirst, craving most the thing 
that poisons. 
  
There is another justice, 
yet you want this vicious chase:
the slit throats,
the bracelets smeared with blood, 
the touch of steel, the sudden eyes… 
And still this planet dances on 
around its seething, heedless fire, 
your justice shining and drying 
and spinning in the sun: turning 
your ignorance to cruelties, 
so what should make you shiver makes you smile. 

				– Duncan McFarlane

Mercy (for soprano and piano)

Pro Coro Canada, cond. Michael Zaugg
Caleb Nelson, soloist
score available through the Pro Coro Canada Choral Series at www.leadingnote.com

This is a lullaby for anyone who cannot sleep. I’ve been interested in sleep and dreams, insomnia and nightmares, for a long time. My text is deliberately ambiguous – is this a parent singing to a child? a lover soothing a lover? It doesn’t matter, really: the point is the comforting. The middle section of the piece is stranger, more alien, subject to the odd logic of half-sleep and dreams. I’ve always loved the idea that at night you may sleep next to someone (you may even be holding hands or entwined) yet your minds take off in completely different directions. You’re together and yet – not. 

The accompaniment in the choir draws on my secret love of doo-wop, and a cappella groups like Rajaton.

when I was a child
 I was afraid of the dark,
 but now, Love, I see
that night is a time for peace.

  here, side by side, 
we sleep,  
each with an arm around
 each 
other  

drifting (drifting, drifting) far 
but never
 untethered,
 always  
together.  

when I was a child 
I was afraid of the dark,
 but now, Love, I see
 that night is a time for peace.

Kiss Goodnight, for a cappella men's choir

performed by Fellows of Bang On a Can's 2014 Summer Music Festival

This short trio emerges slowly, like a sunrise, and then revels in a dancing, shimmering exchange between the three instruments. The middle section – slow and mysterious – serves as a shadowy interlude, exploring bent pitches, quarter tones, and a dialogue of pizzicati and material played inside the piano. But at the end the trio returns to its bright dance, in an ambiguous modality (is it minor? major?) that flickers like light.

Light (for violin, vibraphone, and piano)

Composer-in-residence @ the Canadian Opera Company (2022-)
Composer-in-residence @ Glyndebourne (2019-22)

Photo: Daniel Alexander Denino

Cecilia Livingston

Pinned to spotlight

Popular tracks