IN A COOL, GREEN HALL (2010)

For Fixed Media (Stereo)

Duration 5:25

PROGRAM NOTES

In a Cool, Green Hall takes its title from a poem by Stephen Crane:

The ocean said to me once,

"Look!
Yonder on the shore
Is a woman, weeping.
I have watched her.
Go you and tell her this --
Her lover I have laid
In cool green hall.
There is wealth of golden sand
And pillars, coral-red;
Two white fish stand guard at his bier.

"Tell her this
And more --
That the king of the seas
Weeps too, old, helpless man.
The bustling fates
Heap his hands with corpses
Until he stands like a child
With a surplus of toys."

I was blown away by the devastating emotion concealed in Crane’s verse, as well as his unique way of expressing man’s helplessness in the face of nature’s unpredictability. This composition attempts to capture these sensations by utilizing recordings drawn from diverse locations — a thunderstorm, whale songs, a snippet of Palestrina’s Missa Papae Marcelli — and blending them into a seamless, amorphous sound world.

Premiered in Miller Recital Hall, New York, NY (December 2010)