Performances

Premiere: Panorámicos, Harkness Chapel, Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, Ohio, April 29, 2012

Panorámicos, for the Cleveland Composers Guild, Drinko Hall, Cleveland State University, Cleveland, Ohio, September 30, 2012,

Panorámicos, Harkness Chapel, Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, Ohio, on October 7, 2012

Program Note

Stay, Shadow was commissioned by the award-winning ensemble Panorámicos. It is in the main a setting of a sonnet in Spanish by Sor Juana Inezde la Cruz who lived in New Spain (now Mexico) during the second half of the 17th century. A poet and composer, she is perhaps best known for her feminist epistle Response to the Most Illustrious Poetess Sor Filotea de la Cruz.

For the opening of Stay, Shadow I borrowed a bit of music attributed to Sor Juana, a three-part sacred work for female voices entitled Madre de los primeros, adapting it for the instruments of the ensemble, and bringing it back at the end of the piece to create a frame for my the setting of the sonnet. The sonnet itself is in hendecasyllabic form with an Italianate rhyme scheme (abba/baab/cdc/dcd).