Of All
Maggi Payne
About this work:
When flutist Nina Assimakopoulos approached me to write a solo flute piece for her project title "LITERARY BASED WORKS BY TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY AMERICAN WOMEN COMPOSERS" I was intrigued. I immediately ran through the names of a number of poets in my mind, and landed on Emily Dickinson. I asked my partner if he had a book of her poems, which he did, and when I first opened the book it opened to the page containing this poem. I marked this particular poem, then read through the entire book, only to return to this poem as being the perfect poem on which to base this piece. It is a poem about the wind, in which the first line reads: "Of all the sounds despatched abroad." Each line of the score is a literal representation of the poem. I would read a verse, then work with the ideas and images that Dickinson evoked, finalize the line, then move on to the next verse and interpret that verse in sound, and so on. It's the pure, natural, reflective sense of Dickinson's poem that I'm trying to portray in this work.
Year composed: 2003
Duration: 00:04:14
Ensemble type: Solo instrument, non-keyboard:Flute
Instrumentation: