A Cruel Country
//MUSIC//
A Cruel Country is an eleven piece chamber ensemble in Denton, TX. Their current project is an original song cycle setting poems by Emily Dickinson in an improvisatory chamber music context in an attempt to create a work that takes on the unique and experimental voice of the poet while embracing the Romantic tradition of song cycles. In selecting the poems for this project, pianist/composer Mara Penatzer looked for unifying themes of strength and overcoming (or even just coming to terms with) grief. The resulting music is an attempt to reflect the femininity and emotional intensity of the poems, and focuses on using unconventional forms and phrasing, contrapuntal melodies, serial techniques, and improvisation within varying limitations as a means of expression.
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Good Morning, Midnight
This song sets fragments of two of Dickinson’s poems, both dealing with giving up an old identity or way of life. This is reflected in the two distinct sections of the song, each begun by an isolated solo instrument/voices.
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Dwelling
The concept for this song was to use and abandon serial techniques to illustrate the contrast between enclosure/isolation and openness/interaction in the language of the poem, as well as to provide different interpretations of “possibility”: the obsessively ordered possibility uses each of the tones afforded by the 12-tone system and opposes the possibility of free group improvisation with few to no limitations. Focusing on the word “dwell” is intended to highlight the possibilities of both physical and mental “dwellings”, a place where you live or a neurotic fascination or preoccupation.