music        news/events        bio        contact        recordings Drowning/In the Bus/Ask for Nothing 2007 3 voices musical saw crotale 2 mbiras  4 cellos duration 5' SCORE PROGRAM NOTE This little work is a secular 'motet', setting three distinct and separate poems over each other and allowing the meaning of one text to swim into, and influence, the meaning of another. The ensemble's material is as plain as can be in order for the complications of the text to surface. TEXTS Drowning (I)  If I were in the middle of the Atlantic drowning far from home I would look up at the sky veil of my hiding life and say: goodbye  then I would sink  the second time I'd come up I'd say these are the willful waves of the watery sea which is drowning me then I would sink the third time I'd come up it would be my last my arms reaching my knees falling I'd cry oh oh first friend of my thinking head dear flesh farewell  Grace Paley (1922–2007) In the Bus Somewhere between Greenfield and Holyoke snow became rain and a child passed through me as a person moves through mist as the moon moves through a dense cloud at night as though I were cloud or mist a child passed through me  On the highway that lies across miles of stubble and tobacco barns our bus speeding speeding disordered the slanty rain and a girl with no name naked wearing the last nakedness of childhood breathed in me once no two breaths a sigh she whispered hey you begin again Again? again again you'll see it's easy begin again long ago  Grace Paley (1922–2007) Ask for Nothing Instead walk alone in the evening heading out of town toward the fields asleep under a darkening sky; the dust risen from your steps transforms itself into a golden rain fallen earthward as a gift from no known god. The plane trees along the canal bank, the few valley poplars, hold their breath as you cross the wooden bridge that leads nowhere you haven't been, for this walk repeats itself once or more a day. that is why in the distance you see beyond the first ridge of low hills where nothing ever grows, men and women astride mules, on horseback, some even on foot, all the lost family you never prayed to see, praying to see you, chanting and singing to bring the moon down into the last of the sunlight. Behind you the windows of the town blink on and off, the houses close down; ahead the voices fade like music over deep water, and then are gone; even the sudden, tumbling finches have fled into smoke, and the one road whitened in moonlight leads everywhere.  Philip Levine (b.1928)