"as a ghost before you on the road" attempts to conjure a half-felt sonic presence. Its title paraphrases an English translation of a line from the Irish sean-nós song "Aisling Gheal". Throughout the piece, delicate patterns on the viola, cello, and flute trigger echoes of the sean-nós tune, and all three players must work together to bring this ghost to life.
I'm enormously grateful to Musiqa Houston for commissioning as a  ghost before you on the road, and to Musiqa's wonderful players (Tyler Martin, Tonya Burton, and David Dietz) for premiering it.

as a ghost before you on the road

As a child, I remember asking my mother in frustration why all songs had to be love songs. Surely there were other things to sing about? I certainly thought so, and thus far I’ve largely avoided writing them outside dramatic contexts. Consider this, then, my first love song - of a sort. 

"as if my eyes were caught" uses a network of medieval intertextual refrains: shared segments of music and text that circulated between a wide variety of genres in the long 13th century. For medieval listeners, such refrains often “cued” other works in which they appeared, invoking their melodic, textual, and symbolic connotations. "as if my eyes were caught" plays with such cuing in various ways, including quoting a 13th-century tenor used under a number of the refrains, drawing in recordings made with audio and processes that relate to the texts of the refrains, and (when performed with vocal samples rather than a live singer) literally cuing the vocal samples via tracking the pitch of the flauto d’amore. Often the flauto d’amore articulates the medieval melody of the refrain while the voice delivers a (sometimes reimagined) English translation of its text with related melodic material, the two dancing around each other.  Lyrically, refrains are usually bound up with themes of courtly love, with the speaker admiring an exemplary but unattainable lover; however, medieval creators were masters of manipulating such messages through the layering of various voices and intertextual associations. Is the beloved a typical noble lady? Is she Robin’s Marion or the shepherdess of the pastourelle genre? Is she the Virgin Mary, turning romantic love into spiritual devotion? Is the love portrayed in fact satirical, signalling an apocalyptic mood at the turn of the 14th century? I am fascinated by the ways that medieval creators played with widely circulating, even generic “love song” material to effect their own distinct musical and textual goals. In many ways, "as if my eyes were caught" sits squarely in that tradition of playful manipulation of the identity and symbolic import of the lover and beloved.

Many thanks to Ginevra Petrucci of the Flauto d'Amore Project and singer Heather O'Donovan for their beautiful performance (only somewhat marred by the torrential rain that began just before they began!).

as if my eyes were caught

10', solo B flat or bass clarinet with live electronics.  Premiered in Philadelphia at the November 2017 Penn Sound Collective concert by clarinetist Raissa Fahlman.

We are the same as we have always been

An SSAA choral work commissioned and performed by the Cornell University Chorus.  "Onion Days" uses a Scottish waulking song and a poem by the American poet Carl Sandburg to tell a tale of working women's lives.

Onion Days

Work for soprano, flute, clarinet (doubling Bb and bass), vibraphone, and violin premiered by TAK Ensemble at the University of Pennsylvania in March 2019.

ska jag också bli gammal?

Three Frogs in Arco, Idaho was written in residence at Craters of the Moon National Monument using field recordings made in the park.  It was premiered at the Toronto Creative Music Lab by Olivia Valenza, Anthony D'Agostino, and Nicholas Elert.

Three Frogs in Arco, Idaho

Boreal is a work for clarinet, piano, violin, and cello that was composed for the 2019 Copland House CULTIVATE Institute and the musicians of Music from Copland House. 

The piece started with a melody I’ve had in my head for a quite a long time: the piobaireachd tune MacCrimmon’s Sweetheart.  I did some work on canntaireachd (the vocable system for highland piping tunes) a while ago, and this particular tune has stuck with me. Once I would have been resistant to letting a borrowed tune pervade and drive a work like this, but this melody felt like an old friend it was about time I invited in. In many ways this piece is the opposite of traditional canntaireachd: while canntaireachd is about singing the sound of an instrument, this piece aims to let instrumentalists “play” a voice. Along the way some long-remembered environmental sounds crept in alongside this long-remembered tune. These are mainly familiar sounds from my hometown in Minnesota, though I’m not aiming for any particular kind of veracity in evoking this landscape.

Boreal

This is one piece from a slowly evolving set of structured improvisations for voice and live electronics.

Songs of myself/Songs for myself (II)

Eh/k/oh (2018), trumpet, percussion, piano, and live electronics with the percussionist and pianist also speaking and singing.  Written for SPLICE Ensemble and premiered at the 2018 SPLICE Festival.

Eh/k/oh

I'm a composer and musicologist. I write a lot of vocal and chamber music, both with and without live electronics. I try to write and study music that surprises and excites me. Take a listen if you like!

Flannery Cunningham

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