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| Intimate Lines | |
| Text Author: | Walt Whitman |
| Date Completed: | December 6, 1997 |
| Duration: | 12 minutes |
| Instrumentation: | tenor voice and violin |
| First Performance: | May 3, 1998 at Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh by Robert Frankenberry, tenor and the composer, violin |
| Comments: | for Robert Frankenberry |
| Program Notes: | Intimate Lines These settings of short poems by Walt Whitman were made between August 17 and December 6, 1997 after my partner Robert Frankenberry asked for something to perform with me on his Master's Recital at Carnegie-Mellon University (which we did on May 3, 1998). I chose a few poems from his list of favorites and found some others to create a song cycle that spans the regions of love, life and spirituality. The opening invocation dedicates the work to all hearers; the next resonates in me (with the contrast between mother/child closeness and the solitary poet contemplating the stars) that Transcendental sense of the interconnectedness of all life; next come a pair of songs about being "a pair" which then leads to a contemplation of the self. The concluding song acts as an envoi, the poet singing again of the "Base of All Metaphysics" and what is for me the best justification for creative acts and living: the love of one for another. RZ |