The Answer (2016)

SATB

Text by Robert Creeley

Total duration ca. 6'30"

Single movement work

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Premiered in June 2015

in Baltimore, MD

by Joshua Glassman and the Mt. Vernon Consort

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Listen to an excerpt of this work on Soundcloud

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Audio clip performed by The Princeton Singers as part of the 2016 Lehigh University-ACDA Summer Choral Composers Forum under the direction of Steven Sametz

 

Purchase this score from

Peter Dayton Music (ASCAP) for: $1.00 per copy

Creeley's The Answer is a lament. The poem presents in the form of a question a longing for an openness, clarity, and gentleness, a world of communication as soft as the wind bending the grass. Whether the "we" of the poem is two people or a larger "we," the question's answer abruptly replaces the image of wind-bent grass with walls against which we break ourselves "just to hear it." It is a mourning of the distance we put between each other, seemingly with a perverse intentionality. The text setting builds up from a tentative and naive opening to a wall of sound against which the musical gestures break and crumbling into the poem's sad conclusion.

 

The Collected Poems of Robert Creeley, 1945-1975, by Robert Creeley, © 2006 by the Regents of the University of California. Published by the University of California Press