That Silent Evening

Soprano and piano

Program notes:

“That Silent Evening” is a song of memories and love. The text is from a Galway Kinnell poem of the same title.

Text:

“That Silent Evening”
Galway Kinnell

I will go back to that silent evening
when we lay together and talked in silent voices,
while outside slow lumps of soft snow
fell, hushing as they got near the ground,
with a fire in the room, in which centuries
of tree went up in continuous ghost-giving-up,
without a crackle, into morning light.
…
Lying still in snow,
not iron-willed, like railroad tracks, willing
not to meet until heaven, but here and there
treading slubby kissing stops
…
our tracks
wobble across the snow
…
So many things that happen here are really little more,
if even that, than a scratch

Words from “That Silent Evening” from A NEW SELECTED POEMS by Galway Kinnell Copyright © 1964, 1985, renewed 1992, 2013 by Galway Kinnell. Used by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

Premiered at the Cortona Sessions for New Music in Cortona, Italy July 11, 2015.

Please contact me if you are interested in performing this work.