The Music of Lori Laitman, now available as PDFs
Dear Edna — four songs for soprano and piano (priced for 2 copies)
SM-000580059
- Composer
- Lori Laitman
-
Lyricist
-
Alicia Stallings, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Jennifer Reeser, Diane Thiel
- Publisher
- Enchanted Knickers Music
- Genre
-
Classical / Song
- Instrumentation
- Piano, Soprano
- Scored for
- Solo, Accompanying piano
- Type of score
- Piano-vocal score
- Duration
- 9'30"
- Language
- English
- Difficulty
- Advanced
- Year of composition
- 2009
Description
This cycle was commissioned in 2009 by soprano Hope Hudson and uses poetry by Edna St. Vincent Millay and three contemporary American poets — Jennifer Reeser, Diane Thiel and A.E. Stallings, all acquaintances from The West Chester University Poetry Conference.
On an Album of Millay’s Recording opens with a repeating 3 note accompaniment pattern meant to mirror the image of a record revolving on a record player. The voice rises in pitch as the narrator’s excitement increases, before settling back to the opening mood, as the narrator ponders whether Millay herself might somehow know of the record’s discovery.
I pair Millay’s What Lips My Lips Have Kissed with Diana Thiel’s humorous poem, which imagines what sort of editorial advice Millay might have received from a 21st century editor. The Millay setting is distinguished by a lyrical vocal line that often rises and falls. Listen for the word painting in the accompaniment as the ghosts “tap” on the window, the high vocal melisma on “cry” as well as the wordless ending melismas, which capture the regret of time passed.
Editorial Suggestive intersperses direct quotes from the Millay song with quick short bursts of new material as the editor “comments”. As a humorous counterpoint to an imagined love scene, I reference Tchaikovsky’s love theme from Romeo and Juliet. The cycle ends with A.E. Stallings’ musings after reading the Millay biography Savage Beauty. A rollicking mood created by the use 6/8 and 9/8 alternates with dreamier segments, as the narrator continues to fantasize about what life would be like if she were more like Edna St. Vincent Millay.
Premiere Recording available on Spotify: The Ocean of Eternity — The Songs of Lori Laitman (Acis), with soprano Nicole Cabell and pianist Andrew Rosenblum.