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She Speaks
for mezzo-soprano and piano

In setting Hilda Raz's wonderful poem "She Speaks," I have tried to find musical analogues for the contrasting views of the Garden and the world voiced in the poem. Where Adam is blunt and iron-clad, the narrator (and perhaps the poet) see things in a more variegated light. The allusion at the end of the last stanza, which Adam would surely cast as another monosyllable, is taken up instead by the ensemble in a brief coda.

date: 1993
duration: 6:30
premiere: June 9, 1993, Greenwich House, New York, NY; Friends & Enemies of New Music; Christine Schadeberg - mezzo-soprano, Christopher Oldfather - piano.

score