Recluse Song

ensemble two soprani & mezzo-soprano
written winter 2024
duration 6 minutes

Written for Modern Medieval Voices

text by Robin Helwig-Larsen

Her thoughts were all inside her –
Free from reality –
Poor little cramped-up spider
Who never saw the sea.

program note

Recluse Song is a distant and somewhat self-aware meditation on the process of responding to another person’s art. The piece sets a brief poem by Robin Helwig-Larsen that describes, but never purports to really understand, the swirling inner dialogues of its subject—an introspective recluse poet (heavily implied to be Emily Dickinson). I was simultaneously attracted to yet repelled by Helwig-Larsen’s writing; his poem carried a mild air of pity, but it also managed to walk the line between a number of challenging dualities: the internal versus the external, the intimate and the detached, the vivid and the subdued.

I set out to do to his poem what he had done to Dickinson’s work: rather than inviting listeners fully into any kind of inner world, the music keeps them at arm’s length, adopting a deliberately observational quality. Emotionally placid and measured, the music evokes a sense of stillness, as though seeing a distant figure through frosted glass.

The text is treated nonlinearly, emphasizing the texture of language: the sensation of words on the tongue, the interplay of their sounds, and their resonances against one another. Meaning unfolds gradually, not through narrative progression but through the layering and juxtaposition of fragments.

Ultimately, Recluse Song is a study in detachment, paradoxically invitating listeners to linger in its delicate, suspended world.