songs and interludes (2021)

vocal octet, harmonicas, and percussionist (option also for vocal octet without percussionist)
Duration: c.20’

Co-commissioned by the Manchester Collective and Lorelei Ensemble

UK/World premiere (abridged version): May 5, 2024 — Manchester Collective, Queen Elizabeth Hall, Southbank Centre, London, UK
US premiere (full version): February 22, 2026 — Lorelei Ensemble, The Schwarzman Center, Yale University, New Haven, CT

I. Unsolve

I will try to explain:
I sat down on the banks of the river
and began to wonder what the words might mean,
consider them in that light. 
but when I began to consider,

all I could do was 
unsolve.

[interlude i]

II. imagine a room

I must ask you to imagine a room,
the strife of the tongue and the confusion of the body
picking up a notebook and pencil. 

Are you aware that you are, perhaps, the most discussed 
animal in the universe?

I should need to be a herd of elephants, 
a wildness of spiders,
longest lived and most 
multitudinously eyed
to cope with all this. 

[interlude ii]

III. Draw the curtains

Describe:
A spider’s web still attached at all four corners,
A worm winged like an eagle
A vessel,
A glimpse of heaven

Imagine:
The universe, that refuge of Anonimity,
The act of creation,
The feat of prodigious difficulty, 
The world’s notorious indifference. 

Let her have:
Time, and
thick gloves on her hands, and bars
to protect her of solid gold,
Incandescent, unimpeded.

IV. Impossible

My hand delights to trace
unusual things,
an itch for scribbling
grown about with weeds and
bound with briars.

It poured itself out,
a microscope to the 
frame of a sentence, the
fashioning of a scene, the
extreme activity of the mind
which let flowers fall 
upon the tomb of poetry. 

If one shuts one’s eyes and thinks:
this shape, this moment is not made
end to end
but built
and now lost and,
very likely, 
devoured.

[interlude ii]

V. An answer to several questions / the light
winding itself up again

An answer to several questions might be:

wait.

consider the whole thing more carefully.

the light winding itself up again,

I see
a force in things overlook,
a rhythmical order of
severances and oppositions
and harmony and fusion
perhaps by pausing and looking,

I can
catch a glimpse of the shadow,
shapeless as mist

And then,
give birth to
all kinds of other ideas,
a fountain of
perpetual singing

— adapted by the composer from Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own (1929)