Songs Without Words (2023)
Duration: 7:00 minutes
Instrumentation: horn in F, piano
Premiere: March 23, 2024 by Caroline Steiger, horn and Hyejin Cho, piano at the MidSouth Horn Workshop hosted by Oklahoma State University
Notes:
Songs Without Words is a transcription of three songs from my song cycle A Thousand Tongues, on poems by the American writer Stephan Crane (1871-1900). These three songs seemed to me to work as abstract music, separate from the text that inspired them, and so I retitled them as various classical forms. The Prelude spins out a simple process of groups of notes and intervals in the piano, while the horn provides free-form melodies that floating above the gentle patterning. The Scherzetto is a brief, agitated movement leading directly into the final, hypnotic Berceuse.
