Scourge Songs for Medium-High Voice, Flute, Clarinet, Guitar, Violin, and Cello
5 Songs about the Covid-19 Pandemic on Poetry by Alyse Knorr
Duration: c. 14 minutes
Commissioned by the Nebula Ensemble
Score coming soon
Released on streaming platforms on January 12, 2024
After deciding with the Nebula Ensemble that my piece for them in spring 2022 would be a song cycle, the Scourge Songs, based on the Covid-19 pandemic, I started to think about what I wanted in the piece. What would the text be? I started by looking for poetry on the plague, thinking my piece could be an historical allegory, but then I realized that what I really wanted was contemporary words and ideas about this extraordinary time we are living through. I asked poet Alyse Knorr if she would write some words based on the pandemic. She immediately agreed and sent me several beautiful poems about this modern plague, from the point of view of, among others, a patient, a daughter, a doctor, a friend, and the planet itself. I pondered the best order of the poems and decided to begin with “The Patient,” which opens with an American’s casual disbelief about the severity of what was to come; and to end with “The Friend,” which expresses the way in which the pandemic after only a few weeks seemed to have always been with us. . .and also the way in which it would always be with us. I ended the cycle with Knorr’s words “here and here and always,” which is the second to last line in “The Friend,” because, at least in February 2022, when I finished the work, it felt as if we would never be free of this scourge. The music ranges from frantic to lamenting, and from peaceful to unsettled, reflecting the myriad emotions that we have all experienced since 2020.