works with voice

Water Lilies 1 is a short work for amplified solo voice setting Donna Masini’s poem of the same name from her collection "4:30 Movie." Masini’s Water Lilies poems are assembled floating across the printed page, like flowers resting on a fluid surface. I use amplified voice, electronic filters, and three distinct head positions (or acoustic panning) to mirror Masini’s poetic form, gently swaying and inwardly accumulating as words & sounds float and drift across space.

Here the weariest
		       come to rest 
						in the swirl
	of light and time and water 
				         water and air
    						               blues, teals
     a twisting wisteria
		  	     		seems to wrestle
	  the trellis
			              of its own trail
			   				         tier on tier
    	climbing its wires
				                        of air

				After the war
		   
            in his atelier
					a fog, a silt
					    		      filming each iris
     Monet twisted the laws
			       		of landscape and paint to raise

	    the real 
		   		 into a kind of stairwell
								    to tease 
		his Parisians out of the sterile 
		 			
   trials of war
			   	to rest
						    not to erase
	but ease
				let them stare
			   					and stare


***

https://stephanielamprea.bandcamp.com/album/quaking-aspen 

Recorded as part of New Focus Recordings "Quaking Aspen" project with soprano Stephanie Lamprea, featuring new work by Jason Eckardt, Wang Lu, James May, George Gianopoulos, and Hannah Selin. With special thanks to Stephanie for making this project come to life.

Water Lilies 1 (after Donna Masini) for amplified solo voice & electronics(2021)

Water Lilies 3 is a short work for amplified solo voice setting Donna Masini’s poem of the same name from her collection "4:30 Movie." 

Stephanie Lamprea, soprano

Water Lilies 3

After the allies
after the serial 
trials
the lies
his real 
aim was to make a 
"pond that remembers all"
not to paint "it"
rather 
"the air that touched it"

Water Lilies 3 (after Donna Masini) for amplified solo voice & electronics (2021)

Water Lilies (Floating) is a short work for amplified solo voice setting Donna Masini’s poem of the same name from her collection "4:30 Movie."

Stephanie Lamprea, soprano

(Water Lilies Floating)

		

			water 

						lilies
            will
			air				
wait		
air

				    iris
								    air			
	east        
      			             wars		   
							water
		
		teals
							west
				wisteria  
						trees
  		write						
air
					water			
		
			will-						    
lilies
  laws
						ows swirl

	aisle				
				air

								reels

(Water Lilies Floating) (after Donna Masini) for amplified solo voice & electronics (2022)

from Newtown Odyssey - An open-air opera for, about, and on a creek
libretto by Dana Spiotta
sets, props, and design concept by Marie Lorenz
music & sound by Kurt Rohde

SITE/SCENE 6 on shore just past Penny Bridge
Just past the Penny Bridge, the CREEK BEING becomes visible. They sing and the GUIDES join in, revealing themselves as SPRITES. It is now clear that the GUIDES have been in league with the CREEK BEING all along. SOLO with creek sprites nonword “wordish” singing in background.

CREEK BEING:
Pools of glistening oil make
A perfect mirror: the city skyline Or your faces peering down
Disguise, dredge
Benzene, Dioxin, and Cesium
Surrender to my beauty, my stench, my reek PCB, TCE, and DDT

Pools of glistening oil make
A perfect mirror: the city skyline Or your faces peering down
Maximize, monetize Getty, Texaco, and Exxon
Pour in your overflow, your waste, your excreta Slurry, copper, and sulfuric acid

Pools of glistening oil make
A perfect mirror: the city skyline Or your faces peering down
Reclaim, rezone Sewers, eggs, and CSOs
Give me “the wretched refuse of your teeming shore” Bristle worms, mussels, and cormorants

Creek Being Aria, from Newtown Odyssey, Charlotte Mundy (sop.)

"power is everywhere" is an assemblage of various writings/talks by Foucault. The singer is observer, actor, and deliverer of the message. She is not there to simply sing the text – she is there to instigate the way the music unfolds by way of what the words tell us. She is powerful, taking note of what happens and how to move forward. She is everywhere all the time. My piece is influenced by opera, song cycles, theater, and might even be considered a surreal singspiel.

Left Coast Ensemble, with Nikki Einfeld (soprano)
video: https://youtu.be/75lAqvPOLjQ

TEXTS (indicates omitted words)
Power (is everywhere.)

We must cease once and for all to describe the effects of power in negative terms: it "excludes," it "represses," it "censors," it "abstracts," it "masks," it "conceals." In fact power produces; it produces reality; it produces domains of objects and rituals of truth. The individual and the knowledge that may be gained of him belong to this production.

Discourses are not once and for all subservient to power or raised up against it... We must make allowances for the complex and unstable process whereby a discourse can be both an instrument and an effect of power, but also a hindrance, a stumbling point of resistance and a starting point for an opposing strategy. Discourse transmits and produces power; it reinforces it, but also undermines and exposes it, renders it fragile and makes it possible to thwart.

Freedom of conscience entails more dangers than authority and despotism. In its function, the power to punish is not essentially different from that of curing or educating. Madness is the absolute break with the work of art; it forms the constitutive moment of abolition, which dissolves in time the truth of the work of art.
 
Justice must always question itself, just as society can exist only by means of the work it does on itself and on its institutions. The judges of normality (are present everywhere.) We are in the society of the great teacher-judge, the doctor-judge, the educator-judge, the social worker-judge.
 
The lyricism of marginality may find inspiration in the image of the outlaw, the great social nomad, who prowls on the confines of a docile, frightened order. What strikes me is the fact that in our society, art has become something, which is only related to objects, and not to individuals, or to life. As the archaeology of our thought easily shows, man is an invention of recent date. And one, perhaps, nearing its end.
 
But there exists a system of power which blocks, prohibits, and invalidates this discourse and this knowledge, a power not only found in the manifest authority of censorship, but one that profoundly and subtly penetrates an entire societal network. (Intellectuals are themselves agents of this system of power - the idea of their responsibility for "consciousness" and discourse forms part of the system.) The intellectual's role is no longer to place himself "somewhat ahead and to the side" in order to express the stifled truth of the collectivity; rather, it is to struggle against the forms of power that transform him into its object and instrument in the sphere of "knowledge," "truth," "consciousness," and "discourse."

Truth is a thing of this world: it is produced only by virtue of multiple forms of constraint. And it induces regular effects of power. Each society has its regime of truth, its “general politics” of truth: that is, the types of discourse which it accepts and makes function as true; the mechanisms and instances which enable one to distinguish true and false statements, the means by which each is sanctioned; the techniques and procedures accorded value in the acquisition of truth; the status of those who are charged with saying what counts as true.

Power exists only when it is put into action; it does not require your consent.

If no one knows who you are, can you be forgotten? If memory is power, are those who are forgotten powerless? The powerless are everywhere.

power is everywhere, an observed distraction for soprano & ensemble on texts of Foucault (2017)

Diane Seuss is a poet, a thinker, a seer, a sayer - an oracle of sorts. Her collection Four-Legged Girl is a complete game changer in the way it:
-tells stories, 
-captures the way we remember, reinvent, forget, 
-manages to shock and touch and move us,
-catches us off guard and draws us only further in.

It Wasn't A Dream is a collection of six settings of Seuss's poems from her collection. It is for soprano, tenor and piano four-hands. I composed it for the Brooklyn Art Song Society in 2018. Here is the third setting, which is the middle portion of the title poem. Thanks to soprano Charlotte Mundy, tenor Andrew Fuchs, and pianists Miori Sugiyama and Michael Brofman.

III - It Wasn't A Dream (part 2) from It Wasn't A Dream (2018)

This an easy way to get quick access to recent (& not-so-recent) works of mine. Contact me with any queries. REQUEST: Should you wish to play my work, I ask you include it on a program that reflect the values of belonging, and make an honest effort to be fully inclusive. Thank you.

(pronounced Road-HEE or Rhoad-DAH)