Orchestration

for solo amplified voice and pre-recorded voices
or three sopranos
text by: Kurt Vonnegut

Duration

6 minutes

Commissioned by/Premiere

Daisy Press, voice and prerecorded voices
New Music New Haven, Yale University, December 2007

Score

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Note

Requiem for K.V. was composed in September 2007 and was very much inspired by my now fifteen-year-long relationship with the author of the text, as well as Daisy Press’s uncanny ability to make sonic landscapes out of a single voice. The recording here was made by soprano Christiana Little at Yale University’s Center for Studies in Music Technology.

Text

When the last living thing
has died on account of us,
how poetical it would be
if Earth could say,
in a voice floating up
perhaps
from the floor
of the Grand Canyon,
“It is done.”
People did not like it here.

– Kurt Vonnegut (1922-2007) from A Man Without a Country