This work is written in dedication to my beloved friend, vocalist Julianna Smith. I met Julianna during my junior year semester abroad in the wonderful city of Vienna. Within days of meeting, we soon discovered just how many creative interests we shared and quickly took to becoming the best of friends.The text for this work comes from an english translation of the french poet Arthur Rimbaud’s poetry cycle Les Illuminations; famously used by Benjamin Britten in his song cycle by the same name. This is meant to be a rather fun theatrical work that paints engaging pictures of the scenery and ideas from the text.

Parade

Sturdy enough jesters. Several have exploited your worlds. Devoid of need, in no hurry to make play of their brilliant faculties or their knowledge of your conscience. How ripe they are! Eyes dazed like the summer night, red and black, tricolours, steel pricked with golden stars; features deformed, leaden, pallid, on fire; hoarse-throated frolickers! A cruel swagger of faded finery! – Some are young – how do they view Cherubino? – endowed with frightening voices and dangerous resources. They’re sent out soliciting in city streets, decked out in disgusting luxury.

Oh the most violent Paradise of a maddened grimace! Way beyond your Fakirs and other theatrical buffooneries. In improvised costumes of nightmarish taste they play romances, tragedies of bandits and demigods, spiritual as the tales and religions never were. Chinese, Hottentots, bohemians, fools, hyenas, Molochs, old madnesses, sinister demons, mingling popular homely turns with bestial poses and caresses. They’re ready for new pieces and ‘sweet’ little songs. Master jugglers, they transform people and places and reveal magnetic stagecraft. Eyes inflamed, blood sings, bones thicken, tears and trickles of rouge stream down. Their raillery and their terror lasts a moment, or months entire.

I alone hold the key to this savage parade.

Antique

Graceful son of Pan! Round your brow crowned with flowers and berries your eyes, precious spheres, move. Stained with brown lees, your cheeks are hollow. Your eye-teeth gleam. Your breast is a cithara, chords chime in your pale arms. Your pulse beats in that belly where a double sex sleeps. Walk, at night, gently moving that thigh, that other thigh and that left leg.

To Reason

A tap of your finger on the drum looses all sounds and begins the fresh harmony.

One step of yours is the rising of new men and their forward march.

Your face turns away: new love! Your face turns back – the new love!

‘Change our fate, eliminate the plagues, beginning with Time’ these children sing to you.

‘Breed, no matter where, the substance of our fortunes and wishes,’ they beg.

Arrival from forever, you who’ll depart everywhere.