estrangement (2020)

song cycle soprano and piano
Duration: 23”

Commissioned by Brooklyn Art Song Society with support from the National Endowment for the Arts

Premiered online April 11, 2021
Lucy Fitz Gibbon, soprano, and Michael Brofman, piano

a collaboration with writer Katie Ford, estrangement was commissioned as a response to Schumann’s Dichterliebe.

The 13-movement cycle may be performed as a full set or as selections, and may be intertwined with Dichterliebe.

I. Only once (a)
II. Why, she sees, it didn’t occur to her
III. Only once (b)
IV. rejection possible
V. It was then she realized
VI. The film
VII. How the film ends
VIII. She rarely recalled
IX. She left them (the wall she had to make)
X. Only the song
XI. The labor of forgetting
XII. a novel by a writer from another continent / when she read the novel
XIII. in a jar