Completed April 1, 2023
Premiered April 19, 2024 by Khemia Ensemble in Music for a Great Space, Greensboro, North Carolina
Commissioned by Khemia Ensemble
I have been an admirer of Karen An-Hwei Lee’s sumptuous poetry for years now. Her profound yet transparent writings are often surprisingly prosaic, blending technical buzzwords and theological jargon together with colloquial, personal observations of the world around her. Though her works pose elemental questions about God and existence, the writing never feels pompous: her posture is always one of quiet curiosity and humility.
Selecting a text of hers to set, however, proved quite a challenge. The same features of her poetry that so appealed to me - its unwieldy vocabulary, its prose-like nature, its ambiguity - also made it decidedly tricky to conceive of as song. I was grateful, then, to discover Say If Not a Moon, an unexpectedly lyrical yet no less characteristic piece of hers.
The poem paints a familiar scene of a full moon rising over an ocean. Defying such imagery’s conventionally Romantic or Impressionistic connotations, Lee casts the moon as a coldly indifferent observer: an Eckleburgian eye, gazing out at the world with little interest in its machinations. I sought to capture this passivity in Pupil of Light using two contrasting pieces of material: bright, shimmering gestures in the percussion/piano, and insouciant melody in the voice/winds. Floating their way through such a potentially vibrant world, the singer’s lines seem affectless by comparison - as is Lee’s distant yet beauteous moon.
I am deeply grateful to the intrepid musicians of Khemia Ensemble for commissioning and realizing the piece.