Orchestration

for soprano, soprano saxophone, clarinet in b-flat, and percussion

Text

Poem by Andrés Cerpa

Duration

5 minutes

Commissioned by/Premiere

Premiered October 29th, 2024 at Het Cenakel in Tilburg, Netherlands.

Commissioned by and written for Ensemble VONK.

Score

This score is in exclusivity until October 29th, 2025.

Notes

“Fog in the Mouth of the Mountain” was written at the request of Ensemble Vonk from Tilburg, Netherlands. I was asked to follow a simple prompt: write a song about a rare feeling. When considering a poet who might provide a text for such a state, I thought of my friend Andres Cerpa, a Puerto Rican-American poet from Staten Island, NY.

I met Andres as a fellow at the MacDowell Colony in New Hampshire, and we quickly became friends. We bonded over some of our favorite poets (like James Wright), and I loved his work, which was visceral and emotionally unsparing.

I did not give him any additional requests for his writing, except for the essential need of any composer setting texts: not too long, allowing space for the composer.

The poem he delivered was elegiac and wistful. When setting that text, I tried to create an atmosphere that both emphasized nostalgia while also giving a sense of distance from it. I asked both wind players in the group to play quiet multiphonics (playing more than one note on a normally single-lined instrument) and then set them in unison against a bowed vibraphone playing the same pitches.

This creates a situation of gentle rubbing dissonance that pervades the piece, allowing the soprano to float above this nostalgic yet slightly tense atmosphere. The dissonance represents the imperfect ways we remember our pasts, with memories that are both vivid and slightly distorted. This musical approach mirrors how nostalgia often feels: a mix of warmth and unease, as our recollections never quite match the reality of what was.

As the characters in the poem climb to the top, the soprano’s voice climbs to her highest register. At the climax, she is so high that when she sings “it’s good to see you; it’s been too long / how was the drive?” the words are almost lost. In this sense, I was trying to recapture the feeling of how hard it can be at times to show care for those we love, even though it’s such a simple act.