NEGATION (2021) for unaccompanied soprano

Instrumentation: unaccompanied soprano

Duration: ~2’30”

Performance/Recording History:

• Recorded by Ahava Noham Katzin in early January 2021; premiered on January 8, 2021 at the virtual Sewanee WinterFest Composer/Performer Collaboration Showcase

Text:

Negation by Wallace Stevens (public domain)

Hi! The creator too is blind,

Struggling toward his harmonious whole,

Rejecting intermediate parts,

Horrors and falsities and wrongs;

Incapable master of all force,

Too vague idealist, overwhelmed

By an afflatus that persists.

For this, then, we endure brief lives,

The evanescent symmetries

From that meticulous potter's thumb.

Program Notes:

As I began to think about a piece for unaccompanied soprano, I thought it would be interesting, especially in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, to observe how artists’ work were affected by the last pandemic of a similar scale to the one we are going through right now: the 1918 Influenza Pandemic. This led me to American poet Wallace Stevens’ Negation, which was published (not coincidentally) in 1918. To me, it is very hard to believe that this poem, full of negativity and cynicism, was not influenced at all by the tragic events of the influenza outbreak. Either way, though, it is a chilling work that I feel becomes even more emotionally charged during the ongoing coronavirus pandemic.

NEGATION was written for the 2021 Sewanee WinterFest, and was created in close collaboration with Ahava Katzin.