WHERE WE ARE (2023) for soprano and piano

Instrumentation: soprano and piano

Duration: ~4’30”

Performance/Recording History:

• Premiered by Eloise Fox, soprano and Jonah Cohen, piano, on May 1, 2023 at the Juilliard Composers Concert in Paul Hall at The Juilliard School in New York City, NY

Text:

XV from Octaves

Edwin Arlington Robinson

We lack the courage to be where we are:—

We love too much to travel on old roads,

To triumph on old fields; we love too much

To consecrate the magic of dead things,

And yieldingly to linger by long walls

Of ruin, where the ruinous moonlight

That sheds a lying glory on old stones

Befriends us with a wizard's enmity.

Program Notes:

The title of this song, WHERE WE ARE, is a quote from American writer Edwin Arlington Robinson’s (1869-1935) poem titled XV, which I set to music through this piece. XV is part of a larger collection called Octaves, a series of 28 intensely personal statements which deal with Robinson’s own view of humanity and of the world at large.

WHERE WE ARE was premiered by Eloise Fox, soprano, and Jonah Cohen, piano on May 1, 2023 at Paul Hall at The Juilliard School in New York City, NY.