for soprano and piano
about 8”00
Premiere at Mannes College
New York City
February 15, 2009
As a graduate student I have been asked to consider many of the big philosophical questions. These are common, timeless questions that seem unanswerable by scientific inquiry or philosophical knowledge: our larger purpose, the necessity (or not?) of suffering, the inevitability of death.
I propose that such questions are best answered, if they can be at all, by art. With these thoughts in mind, I have assembled these four poems of Emily Dickinson into a song cycle.
To me, the crux of this set is in the fourth movement, when the singer states, ‚ÄúI shall know why, when time is over, and I have ceased to wonder why…‚Äù
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