Pub Year: 2025

The Light is Always Changing

The Light is Always Changing was initially inspired by the experience of looking at clouds moving against the snow-covered mountains during my first visit to Alaska in late April and May of 2025. I wrote the piece for Wild Shore New Music, and it was premiered and toured in Homer, Anchorage, and Fairbanks, Alaska as part of Wild Shore’s festival in the fall of 2025.

Two early chants are embedded in the piece: the first phrase of the 10th century Veni creator spiritus gives the harmonic structure, and the 9th century Christe qui lux es et dies supplies melodic material. My hope is that it is as mysterious to distinguish melody versus accompaniment in the music as it is to distinguish clouds versus snow in the right conditions.

The title comes from Nothing Personal, an essay written by James Baldwin in the midst of our country’s turmoil in 1964.

For nothing is fixed, forever and forever and forever, it is not fixed; the earth is always shifting, the light is always changing, the sea does not cease to grind down rock. Generations do not cease to be born, and we are responsible to them because we are the only witnesses they have.

The sea rises, the light fails, lovers cling to each other, and children cling to us. The moment we cease to hold each other, the moment we break faith with one another, the sea engulfs us and the light goes out.

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You can hear Wild Shore’s live performance of the piece by visiting 27 April in A Book of Days.

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You can download the performing materials by clicking below, with my thanks for supporting this informal way of publishing:

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Picnic

Picnic is a song for voice and piano, setting a 1967 poem by Adrienne Rich.

Sunday in Inwood Park

            the picnic eaten

the chicken bones scattered

                      for the fox we’ll never see

the children playing in the caves

My death is folded in my pocket

                        like a nylon raincoat

What kind of sunlight is it

                         that leaves the rocks so cold?

Rich wrote this poem towards the end of her marriage to Alfred Haskell Conrad, when she was raising three sons under the age of 12. She wrote about foxes, seen and unseen, many times over the succeeding years.

In An Atlas of the Difficult World, in 1991, she also said: “All picnics are eaten on the grave.”

Picnic is part of my song cycle finish what I haven’t started, about mid-century middle class female unhappiness. The other poets whose words are set in the cycle are Jane Bowles, Lucille Clifton, Anne Sexton, and June Jordan. Picnic is dedicated to Devony Smith and Danny Zelibor, who premiered the cycle under the auspices of the Brooklyn Art Song Society, with immense gratitude for their artistry and sensitivity.

You can listen to Devony and Danny’s premiere performance of Picnic on 19 February in my ongoing project A Book of Days.

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For performing materials, please click the donation link below, with my thanks for your support of this very low-key way of publishing:

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