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Stranger, You Delighted Me
medium voice, and piano or harp
20 minutes texts by various authors Digital Score & Parts Download: Free!! Contact Lisa to order. Score |
Program noteI have always been fascinated by animal life. I respect their strength and adaptations, which in so many areas dwarf our own human skill set. I feel a deep empathy for their intelligence, their relationships, their life cycles, and see many similarities between the human animal and our fellow creatures. Yet there remains something alien: I can never truly understand what it is like to walk through the world from their perspective. These songs invite listeners to slip inside the skin of the stranger, to see the world through wilder eyes, and to appreciate the mysterious and beautiful differences between the human and the animal.
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Texts1. Little Fish (D.H. Lawrence)
The tiny fish enjoy themselves in the sea. Quick little splinters of life, their little lives are fun to them in the sea. 2. Leopard (Anonymous, translated from the Yoruba by Ulli Beier) Gentle hunter his tail plays on the ground while he crushes the skull. Beautiful death who puts on a spotted robe when he goes to his victim. Playful killer whose loving embrace splits the antelope's heart. 3. Flying Crooked (Robert Graves) The butterfly, a cabbage-white, (His honest idiocy of flight) Will never now, it is too late, Master the art of flying straight, yet has--who knows so well as I?-- A just sense of how not to fly: He lurches here and here by guess And God and hope and hopelessness. Even the aerobatic swift Has not his flying-crooked gift. 4. Peacock (D.H. Lawrence) Think how a peacock in a forest of high trees shimmers in a stream of blueness and long-tressed magnificence! And women even cut their shimmery hair! 5. Love Song for a Jellyfish (Sandra Hochman) How amazed I was, when I was a child, To see your life on the sand. To see you living in your jelly shape, Round and slippery and dangerous. You seemed to have fallen Not from the rim of the sea, But from the galaxies. Stranger, you delighted me. Weird object of The stinging world. |
The following copyright information must be printed on all programs for performances and cases of recordings of this work:
Little Fish and Peacock are reproduced by permission of Pollinger Limited and the estate of Frieda Lawrence Ravagli. Copyright © Angelo Ravagli and C.M. Weekley, Executors of the Estate of Frieda Lawrence Ravagli, 1964, 1971. The poems are found in The complete poems of D.H. Lawrence by David Herbert Lawrence, first published in the U.S. by The Viking Press, 1964.
The words from FLYING CROOKED are set to music by permission of AP Watt Ltd. on behalf of The Trustees of the Robert Graves Copyright Trust.
The poem Leopard is by an anonymous Yoruba poet. This translation by Ulli Beier is set to music by permission of the translator.
The poem Love Song for a Jellyfish by Sandra Hochman is set to music by permission of the author.
Little Fish and Peacock are reproduced by permission of Pollinger Limited and the estate of Frieda Lawrence Ravagli. Copyright © Angelo Ravagli and C.M. Weekley, Executors of the Estate of Frieda Lawrence Ravagli, 1964, 1971. The poems are found in The complete poems of D.H. Lawrence by David Herbert Lawrence, first published in the U.S. by The Viking Press, 1964.
The words from FLYING CROOKED are set to music by permission of AP Watt Ltd. on behalf of The Trustees of the Robert Graves Copyright Trust.
The poem Leopard is by an anonymous Yoruba poet. This translation by Ulli Beier is set to music by permission of the translator.
The poem Love Song for a Jellyfish by Sandra Hochman is set to music by permission of the author.