Spatial Poetries for soprano, baritone and keyboard (2019)

Spatial Poetries is an absurdist 3 movement set for soprano, baritone, and piano/organ/hammond organ/electric organ/electric keyboard.
Duration: ~5 minutes.
 
Program Notes:
Spatial poetries is a work in three short movements which uses disparate pieces of text found in three spaces; online, physical, and electronic.
 
The first movement is titled “Facebook Poetry: A public humiliation of hate”. In this mini-movement, I used disgusting, hate comments from Facebook as the text. These quotations are what I’m fighting against, what the performers are fighting against, and this piece is my own way of publicly humiliating those who wrote and left their bigotry on this virtual space. The organist/pianist acts also as a narrator, saying the first names of those of wrote the comment followed by the text of the comment. This is the darkest of the movements, and should be introduced with a content warning to audiences due to the nature of the lyrics. This movement should act as an eye-opener for those who are still ignorant to the rampant hate that is created in western/white supremacist culture. If for any reason a performer would like to omit a comment(s), they may eliminate or replace the text ad lib.
 
The second mini-movement is titled “Bathroom Poetry: Dream”. In this movement I use text found in the bathroom of a local pub in St. John’s, Newfoundland. The text was written with a black marker inside of a drawn heart. The text seemed so shocking, dark and vulnerable that I decided to set it to music. The movement aims to capture the sadness inherent to the implications of the text and tracks my own reaction to reading it.
 
The final short movement is titled “Foolish Poetry: Things my friends have said aloud, without context.” This movement uses unrelated pieces of text that friends of mine have said and that we deemed either funny, ridiculous or nonsensical enough to catalogue on a cell phone. I selected my favorite quotations and arranged them into a lyrical pastiche. This light-hearted movement is an homage to absurdism, musical comedy and my friends. This movements is specifically dedicated to Margot Rodgers, who catalogued the quotations.