Sixth World Symposium on Choral Music ... - NewMusicBox

NewMusicBox May 2003
what I was doing. It is quite true that someone doing a lecture on your piece may know a lot
more… One more thing I want to say about the text: I really wanted to set the text in Spanish.
But Philip said, "Well, you know, we are an English-speaking choir. There will be other people
who could do that very well who will be at the conference. I have two sons, and both of them
have studied Spanish in school for 6-8 years, and they won't tell me what they know, but I know
they have learned something because we have been in places where they have had to use it, and
they seem to have been understood at the time. One thing about my piece, the road continues.
The piece did not seem ready to end yet at the last line. It is quite a quick turn about in the text,
when she says, "What lover ever had so much pleasure?" It's like she said. It just needs a certain
amount of revolutions per minute for the car to feel like it's gotten up to the right speed and it is
ready to stop. So I finally got her part of my way. And so I decided to repeat this line, "What
lover ever had so much pleasure? And I modulated up to a little higher key level. And then I felt
it was the perfect time to introduce the Spanish phrase that says the same for several reasons.
This accomplished several things. It allowed me musically to further the piece to build more
excitement. Plus the musical phrase the way that I set it is really similar to the English that comes
about. So that people won't be saying, "What are they saying, what are they saying?" The line is
the same; the architecture is the same. They must be saying the same line that they have repeated
a couple of times in English, in Spanish. And the thing about the Spanish is, if you think about it,
the Spanish seems much more loaded with excitement, and I don't think it's just that it is foreign.
It is just the number of consonants and vowels that are coming in quick succession. So it
accomplished finally a musical end, which made it as exciting as I thought it should be.
Composers’ Dialogue #1, 08/06/2002