It's Not What You Look At: Five Songs With Thoreau - 10'
Lyric Mezzo-Soprano
Piano
At the end of my first year at The Univeristy of Texas at Austin I was still having trouble scaling back my composiitons. I had just wiped myself out putting on both of my chamber symphonies in one concert which required large forces and a lot of stress. I'm very much interested in writing for opera but instead of jumping into another large scale work, this time with even more forces presumably since it is opera after all, I decided to work with one singer and just a piano to see where my vocal writing chops were at. The song cycle uses text by Henry David Thoreau whose works I had first learned about in my junior year of high school. In addition to simplicity in my orchestration I decided to use simple text as well. Each song uses only one sentence, one quote by Thoreau:
I. Never look back unless you're planning to go that way.
II. It's not what you look at, but what you see.
III.Things do not change, we change.
IV.Truths and roses have thorns about them.
V. There is no remedy for love but to love more.
Each quote holds its own signifigance to me in some form or another beginnning with very ponderous quotes and ending in a joyous romp of love. I chose to write for a mezzo-soprano voice because honestly it seemed like the lamest of the voice types and since this was an exercise in scaling back it fit the bill. Once I had completed the work, however, I realized I was wrong to think that and that the mezzo voice can be just as extravagant as the other voice types.
Take a look!
http://issuu.com/oximousmusic/docs/it_s_not_what_you_look_at-_five_son/1
Piano
At the end of my first year at The Univeristy of Texas at Austin I was still having trouble scaling back my composiitons. I had just wiped myself out putting on both of my chamber symphonies in one concert which required large forces and a lot of stress. I'm very much interested in writing for opera but instead of jumping into another large scale work, this time with even more forces presumably since it is opera after all, I decided to work with one singer and just a piano to see where my vocal writing chops were at. The song cycle uses text by Henry David Thoreau whose works I had first learned about in my junior year of high school. In addition to simplicity in my orchestration I decided to use simple text as well. Each song uses only one sentence, one quote by Thoreau:
I. Never look back unless you're planning to go that way.
II. It's not what you look at, but what you see.
III.Things do not change, we change.
IV.Truths and roses have thorns about them.
V. There is no remedy for love but to love more.
Each quote holds its own signifigance to me in some form or another beginnning with very ponderous quotes and ending in a joyous romp of love. I chose to write for a mezzo-soprano voice because honestly it seemed like the lamest of the voice types and since this was an exercise in scaling back it fit the bill. Once I had completed the work, however, I realized I was wrong to think that and that the mezzo voice can be just as extravagant as the other voice types.
Take a look!
http://issuu.com/oximousmusic/docs/it_s_not_what_you_look_at-_five_son/1