Hammering My Heart

This song cycle for Mezzo-soprano, Clarinet and Piano includes settings of three poems by former Oregon Poet Laureate Kim Stafford. Reading Stafford’s poetry, I am moved by how delicately and how personally he describes experiences that are familiar to me. Each time I’ve re-read the poem “Under My Breath”, about ecstatic moments out in the wild, a theme from J.S. Bach’s cantata “Ich Habe Genug/I Have Enough” has played through my mind. The religious cantata doesn’t appear to have much in common with the poem, except for this: Old Simeon has experienced a kind of spiritual ecstasy. Now he is willing to accept death, because his life has been fulfilled. Ten musical drafts later, I acquiesced to this theme in my mind and used it as a gentle introduction to the equally spiritual experiences in Stafford’s poem. I also borrowed a phrase near the end of the poem for the title of my song cycle. “…all these earth beauties hammering my heart…” The poem “Why No Longer a Wild Bird” begins in a similar vein of communion with nature and with all of existence, so the initial music bears some similarities with the opening song. As the protagonist is required to become civilized, (my term, not Stafford’s), I added spoken voice, harsher tonalities and more jagged rhythms to contrast these two states of being, before a harmonic echo returns to close the piece. Stafford’s delightful poem from a crow’s point of view is structured with a regular meter and rhyme scheme. I couldn’t resist utilizing some musical influences from the world of blues and jazz, along with a swagger from a Soprano Saxophone, to express this poem in song. The stylistic leaps in this cycle—from Baroque to Atonal to Jazz—are very large. I am grateful and honored to have Kim Stafford’s insightful poetry as the unifying voice throughout the songs.