The Music of Lori Laitman, now available as PDFs
A Little Tooth — for mezzo-soprano (or soprano) and piano (priced for 2 copies)
SM-000599643
- Composer
- Lori Laitman
-
Lyricist
-
Thomas Lux
- Publisher
- Enchanted Knickers Music
- Genre
-
Classical / Song
- Instrumentation
- Piano, Soprano, Mezzo-soprano
- Scored for
- Solo, Accompanying piano
- Type of score
- Piano-vocal score
- Duration
- 3'0"
- Language
- English
- Year of composition
- 2023
Description
Years ago, when my daughter Diana Rosenblum was in high school, she introduced me to the poetry of Thomas Lux. As a result, in 2000, I used his poetry to compose my comic song cycle Men With Small Heads.
Now it’s 2023. My daughter has a PhD in music composition from Eastman. She is a fabulous composer, an incredible person, and my joy and inspiration. For her upcoming 40th birthday, I wanted to write her a song. I remembered that I still had some outstanding permissions for other poems by Tom — and it seemed like
A Little Tooth was the perfect choice for the occasion.
The song’s opening rocking accompaniment creates the feeling of a lullaby and the voice enters, joining with this motion. The vocal range expands, culminating in a miniature cadenza. Here the narrator comments on the inevitability of his daughter’s growth, before amusingly imagining her future life events. A slower, sweetly harmonic section mirrors the narrator’s contentment. The voice again rises to a mini-cadenza (mirroring the first), before returning to original rocking motif.