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Objects and Intervals
2009

soprano
flute
clarinet
piano
harp
string quartet

duration 25'

first performance: 
Brave New Works
The Boston Conservatory New Music Festival / February 6, 2009

SCORE

RECORDING—first performance: 

PROGRAM NOTE
Using quotations as material or as 'found-objects' is always a risky business and, indeed, some reviewers of this piece failed to grasp their purpose and read into it some sort of commentary on post-modernism. In fact, they are the musical embodiment of the objects catalogued in the first poem, and their transformations – which are extreme – speak to the transformations found in the second text. Objects and Intervals sets two poems each about connectedness between lovers. In Peter Gizzi’s It was Raining in Delft this connectedness is felt over a great distance, semaphored by small events and everyday objects. In Seven Happy Endings by Li-Young Lee, a couple are both in the same room where a rich silence gradually surrounds the two of them, seemingly emanating from their interaction. These two poems are set in one continuous movement, however, this continuous movement is intercut with an increasingly widely spaced set of variations on a quodlibet. The quodlibet acts as a Pool (its title) for various explorations in compressing the material, indeed these variations are titled Compressions rather than ‘variations’. In addition there is a background Scrim which emerges from time to time, sometimes acting as accompaniment to the two song settings. There are many further disruptions to the unfolding of the texts; some textural, some structural, some in the vocal line itself, and some—as the string quartet, piano, and harp have various quarter-note retunings—resulting from playing with expectations about pitch.

TEXTS
It Was Raining In Delft
A cornerstone. Marble pilings. Curbstones and brick. 
I saw rooftops. The sun after a rain shower. 
Liz, there are children in clumsy jackets. Cobblestones 
          and the sun now in a curbside pool. 
I will call in an hour where you are sleeping. I've been walking 
          for 7 hrs on yr name day. 
Dead, I am calling you now. 
There are colonnades. Yellow wrappers in the square. 
Just what you'd suspect: a market with flowers and matrons, 
          handbags. 
Beauty walks this world. It ages everything. 
I am far and I am an animal and I am just another I-am poem, 
          a we-see poem, a they-love poem. 
The green. All the different windows. 
There is so much stone here. And grass. So beautiful each 
          translucent electric blade. 
And the noise. Cheers folding into traffic. These things. 
          Things that have been already said many times:
leaf, zipper, sparrow, lintel, scarf, window shade. 
Peter Gizzi (b.1959)


Seven Happy Endings
Love, after talking all night,
where are we? where did we begin? 

I needed to name this, needed to know
what we meant when we said we,
when we said us, when we said this. 

I wanted to call it something:
Shadows on a garden wall.
A man rowing alone out to sea.
Seven happy endings. 

And you? You were happy
with two rooms, and a door to divide them.
And daylight on either side of the door.
Borrowed music from an upstairs room.
And bells from down the street
to urge our salty hearts.


But I woke up one night
and I realized I was falling.
I turned on the lamp and the lamp was falling.
And the hand that turned on the lamp was falling.
And the light was falling, and everything the light touched
falling. And you were falling
asleep beside me.
And that was the first happy ending. 

* * 

And the last one?
It went something like this: 

A child sat down, opened a book,
and began to read. And what he read out loud
came to pass. And what he kept to himself
stayed on the other side of the mountains. 

But I promised seven happy endings.
I who know nothing about endings.
I who am always at the beginning of everything.
Even as our being together
always feels like beginning.
Not just the beginning of our knowing each other,
but the beginning of reality itself. 

See how you and I
make this room quieter with our presence. 

With every word we say
the room grows quieter. 

With every word we keep ourselves
from speaking, even quieter. 

And now I don't know where we are.
Still needing to call it something: 

* * 

The fountain's water
ringing the lip of the rock. 

A clock the bees unearth,
gathering the overspilled minutes. 
Li-Young Lee (b.1957)