Breath in a Ram’s Horn (1996)

for high voice and piano

Duration 12 Minutes

Commissioned by Paul Sperry

Performances

FEBRUARY 1997
TUCSON, AZ
WORLD PREMIERE
Paul Sperry, tenor; Tannis Gibson, piano
Crowder Hall
University of Arizona
Tucson, AZ

Program Notes

Breath in a Ram’s Horn is a song cycle of five poems. They range from the sublime to the mundane, from the sacred to the profane.

The texts are by the writer/poet Paul Pines. He and I first met at the MacDowell Colony, an artist’s retreat in Peterborough, New Hampshire. We became close friends, partly as the result of a shared ferocity brought to the game of table tennis. I requested books of poetry. I have so far written five works based on his writings.

His poems seem to bring together very disparate worlds, uniting a wealth of emotional perspectives. The imagery ranges from Ecclesiastes to the Blues, stating something universal that is culled from the simple and earthy. At the core of the work is man’s uneasy place in the universe; that of a curious bystander to his own inner world, living in a physical world he also hardly understands. How these interior and exterior worlds meet and interact is the enigma at the center of these poems. However it is an enigma that is often imbued with a wry and delicate sense of humor.

The poems in this cycle are imbued with images of family and Judaism, and their intertwining. One finds memories of the poet’s father, mother, and grandfather; memories of prayer shawls, phalacteries, praying; imagery of the high holydays, Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur, and the power of recollection; and a reflection on Job and David. And just like the lives of these two Biblical characters, the poems are not pretty or easy, but rather filled with the difficulties and anguish of a life as it is really lived.