Popping Bubbles (2015): Four Poems of Emily Bobo

for Mixed Choir a cappella – 8 min.

Video (Scrolling Score)

Video (Poem Video)

Audio

Score (free download)

Program Note

When Dominick DiOrio asked me to write a work to be sung by the tremendous musicians of NOTUS (an amazing number of whom have been my composition students at one time or another) it seemed appropriate to set the words of a poet with whom I also felt a personal connection. I recently collaborated with Emily Bobo, who created a very special world of poetry to match the medium of 2 sopranos accompanied by Native American flute in our song cycle Medicine Wheel. For the NOTUS commission, I was delighted to find 4 poems she had written that suggested fresh ways of dealing with the choral medium. I tried to capture in music something analogous to the worldview I sense in Emily’s poems: strongly rooted in day-to-day reality, but ready to transform at the pop of a bubble into something magical, transfigured, and transcendent.