It wasn’t a dream… for soprano, tenor and piano four-hands on texts of Diane Seuss

(2018)

I met Diane Seuss in the summer of 2016. I had not read her work before meeting her. Her volume of poetry Four-Legged Girl struck me, since many of the poems recall a life in New York City in the late 1970s, a life I remember as a young child growing up there. Her work offers the best parts of poetry: writing that can be read, or spoken, or sung, that tells a strange story that doesn't make sense while making complete sense, that defies complete intelligibility and tells a really, really wonderfully complicated—and weird—and beautiful—story. I hope I have done the words justice. It wasn't a dream lasts about thirty minutes and is a setting of five poems from Seuss's collection Four-Legged Girl. It was composed for and is dedicated to the Brooklyn Art Song Society and written with much affection and admiration for Diane Seuss. A recording of the work is available on CD with the Brooklyn Art Song Society on Albany Records. The work is in seven movements:

I - It wasn’t a dream (Part I)

II - Free Beer

III - It wasn’t a dream (Part II)

IV - I can’t stop thinking of that New York skirt…

V - It wasn’t a dream (Part III)

VI - Jesus with his cup

Epigram - from We fear the undulant

 

I met Diane Seuss in the summer of 2016. I had not read her work before meeting her. Her volume of poetry Four-Legged Girl struck me, since many of the poems recall a life in New York City in the late 1970s, a life I remember as a young child growing up there.