Instrumentation:

• SATB — piano (optional)

Text: Emily Dickinson

Duration: 7:00

First Performance: 16 May 2019 / Coach Barn of Shelburne Farms, Shelburne, VT / Lake Champlain Waldorf School Spring Benefit Chorus / Steven Olson, conductor

Program Note:

• This piece represents my first professional foray into choral composition. Like most of my music, the language is tonal in essence but colored by passages of dissonance for dramatic purposes. I like moving from discord to tranquility or from peace to unrest and back to peace again, all aiming to set Emily Dickinson’s poem I have a Bird in spring, which provided a wonderful narrative for this aesthetic. I believe the poem deals with the fear of losing something or someone close to you, only to be comforted by the fact that it, or they, will come back in time, influenced by a greater experience.

  It can be performed with or without the piano accompaniment.