An ephemeral, lyric flash of brightness.

Duration: 3'

Year of Completion: 2011

Orchestra: picc22Eh22Bcl2Cbn 4331 hp 3perc timp strings

Composer’s Note:

In 2011 on a commission from the Brooklyn Friends of Chamber music, I wrote Wanderings, a set of three songs for soprano, baritone and piano based upon the poems of Diane Gregory, a local Brooklyn poet. This present work is an orchestration of the song, ‘the Sky in Connemara’ the short middle song from Wanderings.

Gregory’s poem sparkles with vibrant and vivid imagery that inspired this shimmering, lyric composition. Here is an excerpted version of the poem that was the text for the song:

Never free from clouds / never at rest / the sky in Connemara / tugs at us / to come close / puffs of tendrilled vapor / trail from hilltop to lough / to ocean / Gray sweeps in / to be foiled / by a patch of blue / a blaze of sun rays / sent to a rocky slope / sets mica and quartz / to sparkling. / Another streak / on a lake / gleams like a flashy fishtail. / At last we find rapture / when a rusty trawler / flames into orange.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                  —K.B.