» Three e.e. cummings poems (2004)
for choir SSAATTB
duration: 6 mintues

Commissioned by/Premiere:
  Parallel Motion Chamber Choir, Kyle Siddons, conductor, Feburary, 2005
Additional performances:
  Parallel Motion Chamber Choir, Kyle Siddons, conductor, Feburary, 2005
  Yale Schola Cantorum, Dennis Schrock, conductor, March 2010



second movement, "un / der fog"
Download the Score

About the Work:
In my first lesson as an undergraduate, I brought my teacher Nils Vigeland in what I thought my best piece at the time—a sextet for flute, clarinet, percussion, piano, violin, and cello. It was highly dramatic (bathetic in retrospect) and featured a repeating note getting faster and faster and then striking a note a tritone below. Nils takes one look at the piece and says, “If I have to see one more piece for Pierrot Ensemble (what that grouping is often called) starting off with a repeating note motive, I’m going to commit Hari-Kari. Why start a piece the same way way every late twentieth century piece does?” The next week I brought in a choral piece, these Three e.e. cummings poems, which I had composed in a period of two weeks and considered a trifle at best. Nils flipped out--despite being very traditional sounding, the form of the choral piece was very unconventional. But because the sextet was dissonant and serious and the choral piece was tonal and light I assumed the sextet was the more modern and therefore interesting piece. What Nils taught me was to flip those premises—the most experimental pieces could be tonal, and the most conservatives ones atonal. No teacher before that had even considered that. (Later that choral piece got the highest compliment I could want from Pierre Boulez, "It starts out like every other American choral piece, but suddenly, it becomes interesting.")

All works are Copyright Christopher Cerrone and published by Outburst-Inburst Musics. For a printed perusal score and CD recording, please contact me.