Green Graphite

Program Note

Text by Aleksandr Allen

Green Graphite –
Pulled out
to scribble short leanings –
I am rent,
and useless,
stretched, bloated, but
thin like an old shirt.
Caverned ears –
Quiet-
need I anything
but hold on
when words are but better evisceration
than somewhere-lurking fish
of the deep?

The inspiration for this work was sparked in the summer of 2007 and was written in September of that same year. While home working as a guest dancer I was musing on writing a choral piece and in particular the text to work with having chosen 2-3 different possibilities. My parents had a number of wind chimes outside our house, and I became interested in one in particular with its strong and resonant timbral qualities and especially the indeterminate nature of pitch and rhythmicity when it reacted to the differing wind patterns’ strength and direction. What was striking about this were three notes that kept repeating themselves in a somewhat regular period and immediately jumped out as a perfect complement to one of the texts I had chosen and I knew then that I had the impetus of the work.