Night
Michael Wittgraf
About this work:
Night by Michael Wittgraf was commissioned by Therese Costes and Elizabeth Rheude. It is for soprano, clarinet, and 2-channel electronic recording. The text is by Dennis Cooley. The composer chose six poems from Cooley’s Perishable Light, This Only Home, and Bloody Jack. The music is continuous, with no break between poems. The order of the poems reflects to some degree the passage of time at night. This concept is especially evident in the first and last poems: night and dawn. In night, the sun is “nudged off its chair”, marking the beginning of darkness, while the return of light is described in dawn. The texts of the interior poems bring us into varied elements of night – the moon, outer space, and a description of a prairie night. The spatial placement of words and symbols on the page is important in Cooley’s poetry. The composer wishes to bring out this aspect in combination with the text’s remarkable ability to startle the reader with images that convey senses of astounding largeness and intensity. Some of these images conjure a wide-eyed pondering of infinite space, while others give a feeling of overwhelming complexity that overloads the senses.
Year composed: 2002
Duration: 00:15:00
Ensemble type: Chamber or Jazz Ensemble, Without Voice:Other Combinations, 2-5 players
Instrumentation: 1 Clarinet, 1 Soprano, 1 Prerecorded Sound (Tape/CD/Other)
Instrumentation notes: Stereo Fixed Media