Premiered June 6th, 2024

Sarah Nelson Craft, mezzo-soprano
Jessica Meyer, viola
Michael Brofman, piano

10′

PROGRAM NOTE

When I first read these poems by Adrienne Rich a few years ago, I was immediately struck by the vivid imagery she creates, however there were some things I didn’t quite understand yet. This sometimes happens with poetry I set, where the meaning of the text and how it relates to my own life only becomes illuminated at the time I start writing the piece. In this case, all started to make sense after I found out about Rich’s history (and legacy) as a woman who was married to a man for a great stretch of her life, emerged from mid-century housewife oppression while coming out as gay, then lived the rest of her life unapologetically as a person and as an artist.

The first song is a section of a much longer poem, which I felt needed a heavy dose of drama. Her thoughts on how randomly love can happen, all while negotiating the forces that may be “ranging” within ourselves and against ourselves via societal expectations, resonated with me very much. The second poem, “Song”, is a beautiful set of vignettes capturing moments that may seem lonely at the outset, until one realizes that the independence shown here might actually be desired – and deeply needed.

These songs are some of my favorite compositions to date, and I deeply thank the Brooklyn Art Song Society, Michael Brofman, and Sarah Nelson Craft for this opportunity. Adrienne Rich, “Song” and “21 Love Poems” from Collected Poems: 1950-2012, published by W. W. Nort

TEXT

I. within us and against us (text: poem 17 from “21 Love Poems”)

No one’s fated or doomed to love anyone.
The accidents happen, we’re not heroines,
they happen in our lives like car crashes,
books that change us, neighborhoods we move into and come to love.
Tristan und Isolde is scarcely the story,
women at least should know the difference
between love and death. No poison cup,
no penance. Merely a notion that the tape-recorder
should have caught some ghost of us: that the tape-recorder
not merely played but should have listened to us,
and could instruct those after us: this we were,
this is how we tried to love,
and these are the forces they had ranged against us,
and these are the forces we had ranged within us,
within us and against us, against us and within us.

II. if (text: “Song”)

You’re wondering if I’m lonely:
OK then, yes, I’m lonely
as a plane rides lonely and level
on its radio beam, aiming
across the Rockies
for the blue-strung aisles
of an airfield on the ocean

You want to ask, am I lonely?
Well, of course, lonely
as a woman driving across country
day after day, leaving behind
mile after mile
little towns she might have stopped
and lived and died in, lonely

If I’m lonely
it must be the loneliness
of waking first, of breathing
dawn’s first cold breath on the city
of being the one awake
in a house wrapped in sleep

If I’m lonely
it’s with the rowboat ice-fast on the shore
in the last red light of the year
that knows what it is, that knows it’s neither
ice nor mud nor winter light
but wood, with a gift for burning