Sestina, To Alex

For sop, fl, cl, vln, vc, pno
Duration: 11 minutes

2005

Text by Aleksandr Allen:

Words and words. Your words, but few of your features –
those monuments, great tsars of night.
Let me pass them and look to the fall
Of a sulfur star, it’s green
Trails. The sky stays uniform,
the hills and hues of your face are mysterious,
covered, obscure. You were mysterious
but then in words, now in features
that are fallen fruit, eaten from uniform,
barren, spider web branches, your night-
washed hair. I sift through the green
of that summer. Though you fall
away, I still smell the breeze and fall
upon thoughts of mysterious
words. Though I was green,
my face and features,
surprised, serious, blackened with night,
refused the reverberant uniform –
flashing with color, unfitting. The uniform –
I let fall
from my shoulders as I wrapped them with night.
I remember you standing beside, mysterious
as your voice filled with features
of care, round and smooth, a whisper of green.
Your eyes – were they green
or brown or coal, the cap of a uniform
to fit with your hair? Your portrait features
nothing but hair and words that fall
around my ears to say we match – mysterious
cats, lynxes in the night
air. I sway with the pull of this night
and the moon, and a mesa covered with green.
The vast, the mysterious,
a rugged horizon, a uniform
sieve through which I cannot fit to fall
in a trickle, let alone the rapid features
of a river at night. There’s a tear in the uniform
right through a patch of green. I watch as maple seeds fall
around me with spinning, mysterious movements and features.

Program Note:

Sestina, To Alex was completed in the summer of 2005. I had always wanted to write a work for solo voice, but being a singer I had somewhat of a trepidation over the many problems/challenges involved in writing for the instrument, the first one; finding the right text. I had always been attracted to poetry of my brother for its uniqueness, and particularly this sestina because of the unusual choices of the key words. Although the sestina is a highly structured form of poetry I decided to be more abstract in the setting of the text, rather, drawing musical meaning from the poetics than from structure of the text. This work is dedicated to my friend Caitlin Fischer, a very talented young soprano for whom the vocal qualities and range were the inspiration of this work.