The Dark

Program Notes

Keagan Hawthorne's intriguing tale in The Dark tells of a young girl's experience close up with danger, discovery and new perspectives. Picking up an almost folkloric interpretation of the words, I set the text as if telling a folktale. I'm especially interested in what the speaker's mother heard and saw, and what the river actually had to say; of course I don't divulge that in this composition, nor has Keagan in the text, but I like to imagine the hummed and sung parts of this setting to be a bit of dialogue between the two characters, before the speaker's mother is rescued from the most beautiful thing she'd ever seen.