What to Do With a Heart? Program Notes for a Half Recital

Presented as the second half of a choral conducting recital with the Conductors’ Choir of Peabody Conservatory

Canzonette a tre voci – Claudio Monteverdi (1567–1643)

Come faro cor mio, SV 11

litte tree – Judith Weir (b. 1954)

i carry your heart with me

Giu li a quel petto, SV 17 from Canzonette – Monteverdi

(kiss me) from Two E. E. Cummings Songs – Augusta Reed Thomas (b. 1964)

Corse alla morte, SV 12 from Canzonette – Monteverdi

(Never) Bright Enough – Katherine Pukinskis (b. 1986)

Hor care canzonette, SV 21 from Canzonette – Monteverdi

now is a ship from little tree – Weir

with interludes by Francesca Hellerman

The […] program is presented in four pairs of old and new music, each individually united by specific themes and images, and all running along common threads: love, embodiment, vulnerability, and what to do with the heart. Monteverdi’s songs are simple in form and voicing, and present classical ideals of love, among them the body’s beautiful reflections in nature, and passionate inspirations from myths. Three living composers (drawing largely on poems by E. E. Cummings) offer modern reflections to the Italian settings. Judith Weir situates Cummings’s poems over a perpetually humming marimba, transporting us to the softly glowing imagination of a lover’s presence or a journey ahead. Augusta Read Thomas, on the other hand, devises musical analogues—inversion, pointillism, dynamic extremity—to reflect the eclectic world bound within Cumming’s strophic stanzas. In the Katherine Pukinskis’s climactic (Never) Bright Enough, two philosophies of love are brought to visceral contrast through vocal percussion, timbre and harmony; the common ground found between them is carried from an incantation to a raw outpouring of energy through Spanish and English text woven together.

(Never) Bright Enough was originally written for the Artemesia Trio, and has been adapted for full choir and trio in collaboration with the composer.