[since feeling is first] (2024)

General Information

Text: [since feeling is first] by e. e. cummings (1926)
Commissioner: Written for the HEX Ensemble, ensemble-in-residence for the USC Thornton Composition Department, Fall 2024
Written: September – October, 2024
Duration: ca. 5’
Instrumentation: soprano + mezzo-soprano + alto + tenor + tenor/countertenor + bass-baritone

Performance History

November 15, 2024: Open reading by the HEX Ensemble at Ramo Hall, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA (World Premiere)

Program Note

In my compositional life, I am very interested in the question of musical meaning: whether music has the ability to carry meaning that exists outside of reference to other sound or cultural artifacts. I was drawn to e. e. cummings’ [since feeling is first] in a moment of artistic despair, having nearly convinced myself that all music is meaningless – being, in its bare essence, just a collection of sounds. Reading the first lines of this poem, “since feeling is first / who pays any attention / to the syntax of things / will never wholly kiss you,” I was reminded that often our primary response to music is simply emotion. One can construct a reading of this poem that says that all of the intricate details of structure and musical form, logic, and rhetoric that we composers obsess over are simply minutae in the face of emotion – “laugh”, “love”, “leaning back in my arms.” Though I’m not sure these questions I wonder about are even answerable at all, this piece is a personal affirmation that to strive for meaning is not a futile exercise, because at the end of the day, “we are for each other.”

Text

[since feeling is first]
by e. e. cummings

since feeling is first
who pays any attention
to the syntax of things
will never wholly kiss you;

wholly to be a fool
while Spring is in the world

my blood approves,
and kisses are a better fate
than wisdom
lady i swear by all flowers. Don't cry
– the best gesture of my brain is less than
your eyelids' flutter which says

we are for each other; then
laugh, leaning back in my arms
for life's not a paragraph

And death i think is no parenthesis