For flute, mezzo-soprano, and acoustic classical guitar [7:15]. Composed for the Charlotte New Music Festival.
Different Perspectives was inspired by my personal experience struggling with issues brought on by Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder. It is a setting of the poem “Invictus” by William Ernest Henley (1849-1903), which is provided below. The piece is divided into four sections, one for each stanza of the poem. Each section portrays adversity in a different situation and approaches it from a different perspective.
The first section evokes a vast, dark, empty space through the use of silence, register, and harmony. The person in this space faces this adversity with aplomb. In the second section, the person is violently struck down in an animalistic, savage world. However, she keeps rising back up and refuses to succumb to the world’s hostility. The third section takes place in a world that does not adhere to the normal rules of time. In this surreal place, time moves randomly in a nonlinear fashion as the person ponders the foreboding unknown after death. The fourth section illustrates a perspective of adversity in general. In the same manner that the different elements within a Cubist painting come together to make a new whole, these sections add cumulatively in the listener’s mind to form a comprehensive image of adversity and different ways to approach and hopefully overcome it.
Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.
In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.
Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds and shall find me unafraid.
It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate,
I am the captain of my soul.
-William Ernest Henley (1849-1903)
Performances
June 11, 2016. Tate Hall, Central Piedmont Community College. Charlotte, NC. Premiered by Molly Barth, Kayleigh Butcher, and Dieter Hennings-Yeomans, at the Charlotte New Music Festival.