Songs Of Desire, Love And Loss

Following convention, an accidental applies to occurences of the note before wich it appears within a measure, within the octave in which it occurs, unless cancelled. Nevertheless, accidentals are frequently repeated witin a measure to aid reading.Slurs in the piano part are used to indicate phrasing and legato articulation only and do not imply the use of the pedal. The score is in C, and sounds as written, except for the Glockenspiel, which sounds two octaves higher than written. I came toAlan Dugans work through one of those sets of circumstances that retrospectively seems almost fateful. During a day spent browsing at a bookstore, two friends, one of whom had grown up with Dugan for a neighbor, bought me a copy of Poems Seven. Aswe sat and read them together I was pulled in by Dugans combination of emotional directness (often rawness) and complexity, apparently contradictory impulses that impel my work as a composer as well. It occured to me that I might set a few of theseto music at some future point, not suspecting that this commission would come only a few months later. Part of what appealed to, and resonated with, me about Dugans work was the brute (and brutal) anger to which much of it gives voice, and which hasdrawn the most attention to him. In the end, though, I chose poems that show another side of his poetic persona. Although his trademark anger is often present, if only through an underlying tension and the suggestion of violence (eg. blowing/monarchsto pieces in the third song), these poems have, for me, a haunted-ness and occasionally even bitter-sweetness that makes them, for me, more conductive to a moderate-scale vocal work. Poems Seven is a complete anthology of Dugans published work,which came out two years before his death in 2003. The poems I chose therefore span decades in their composition (Argument to Love as a Person stretches back to Poems Two, published in 1963), and were not originally intended to appear together. Thatsaid, they share similar themes (eg. the mutation of the spiritual to the fleshly - the dove itself come down / to be the pigeon in the first song, the soul as gust-at-an-inn in the second, the souls fall to flesh in the fourth), and images (eg.flowers, whether roses or rhododendrons) that made them fit together for me. In fact, it was ultimately possible - as well as being musically and dramatically advantageous - to arrange them into a quasi-narrative. It is non-specific, generalized sortof narrative - outlining a development from desire, to love, to loss - and one with contradictory (or at least paradoxical) and off-topic branches and implications. Nevertheless, it gives structure and definition to the ordering of the songs, and issomething I bore very much in mind while composing them. - James Matheson