World Premiere presented by Music Mondays
in New York City, May 19, 2025
for tenor, violin, cello, and piano
Commissioned by the Andromeda Foundation, Robert and Jane Morse, Trustees, for the Claremont Trio and Paul Appleby
16′
PROGRAM NOTE
I have been delving deeply into my own personal growth over the past few years. During that journey I have been learning a lot about various attachment styles and how our early childhood and adolescent experiences can form the programming that we unconsciously turn to throughout our adult lives, if we let it. I was reading more about 20th Century psychologist Carl Jung and his seminal work on the concept of our “shadow” self: the parts of us we have suppressed since childhood because at some point in time we “learned” from those around us that those parts of our personality/self are not acceptable/lovable. Fast forward to this set of poems about a relationship ending and the moving on afterwards, and this piece became a catalyst for taking a serious look at the patterns one can repeat until one finally reconciles what life experiences have prompted them.
I have known poet Giancarlo Latta as a fellow string player, and I used to read aloud to the audience the first poem of this series whenever I played my piece “Touch” for viola and loop pedal in my solo shows. When Music Mondays was looking specifically for a set of songs that capture the Upper West Side, I immediately thought Giancarlo’s work was a great fit. While using both Riverside Drive and Central Park as a multi-seasonal backdrop for these songs, I hope this combination of words and music gives us a deeper connection to not only the great city we live in, but also with the inner reaches of ourselves.
It is a dream to write and collaborate with tenor Paul Appleby on this piece and an honor to write for the Claremont Trio, whom I have known about for quite some time. I remember rehearsing in the Bruskin/Wunsch apartment when our kids were little. I dedicate this work to my son, a lifetime New Yorker who is now away at his first year of college, slowly but surely figuring himself out as an adult, already light-years ahead in his personal awareness compared to his parents.
TEXT
THREE POEMS
By Giancarlo Latta
I. Riverside Park, Late Summer
If, at that moment when the sun burns the
tops of the trees and gold filters down,
mottling the pavement like day-old snow—
If, sitting then beside you, watching a
glittering pearl of sweat run alongside
the delicate vein in your temple—
If, perhaps for the last time, you reach out
and place your hand, palm to the sky, on my
bare knee, turning your head to look
not at me but into the moment just beyond—
Is this, then, a space for all the words
that have gone unsaid?
—that belong to each
other? Take them, but if you cannot hold on,
raise your cupped palm, give them to the breeze.
II. Interlude (Snow Angel)
First a paralysis
covers pulled tight, gasping
for breath on the stumbling
edge of dreams…
Come lie down on my shadow
Come fold into my outline
Then a loosening
the dark thins, waking
to a world ghost-lit
through sheer curtains…
Come fall into the dented space
My body has carved out
Sleep and dust
still in the eyes, cold
rising off the windowpanes and
the snow dense, silver, luminous…
I am
not there
My absence
makes this space
for you
And the snow dense, silver, luminous…
III. Spring
Walking along the reservoir, I think how depth
begins a mystery. A billion gallons of water
beneath but the surface calm, vinyl-black
and unbreakable like the record
has finally come to an end.
Memory is a wide boulevard in the
opposite direction – the room becoming
thicker with smoke as time wears on. As a child
I sailed a toy boat on this same water. Other kids
laughed and played around me but I couldn’t let go,
the water would swallow my boat whole.
The surface didn’t fool me: I knew already then
that something beautiful could crack.
Now, I want to be consumed. Deep inside
the park, far away from the city streets, I like it best
when there are only specks of sky. The trees’ greening
is its own kind of dizzying intimacy.
And I know that if there is a beauty in being
consumed there is, too, in the emergence after.
How when the light dances, finally, on the water, and
everything takes on a sparkling new reality,
I think of the city, history, you.