to sing for solo voice

(2018/rev. 2020)

Give me a few words for a woman

to sing a truth allowing us

to build a house without worrying before night comes

-Markus Kutter

I returned to this piece after quite some time. My original version, like so many of my "first tries" at a piece, left me deeply dissatisfied. I liked the basic musical ideas, and I liked the concept for the piece, but the design of the work was sloppy and unintegrated. This second version uses much of the same material from the vocal part, and keeps the body drumming intact. In revisiting the work, I realized that the idea of having Kutter's modular poem being read in any order was a delightful concept that needed to be investigated differently.

Perhaps the setting would follow a more traditional technique of notated setting the text, with the body drumming being use to differently activate the vocal part. Perhaps at a dramatically vital juncture, the rigid written notation will give way to a more improvisatory, performer-centered notation, allowing the singer to fly more freely away from what I want and towards what they imagine. Perhaps the line "to sing" would be reserved for the end of the song, since that is what I want my modular reading to focus on. Perhaps this is what I did.