Instrumentation: two pianos, with optional electronics
Year Composed: 2018
Duration: 24 minutes
Program Notes:
Coursing in emptiness, I, Lalla, dropped off body and mind,
and stepped into the Secret Self.
Look: Lalla the sedgeflower blossomed a lotus.
-Lal Ded, (14th Century), translated by Coleman Barks
I stumbled upon this ancient poem in Jane Hirshfield’s marvelous anthology Women in Praise of the Sacred: 43 Centuries of Spiritual Poetry. As is often the case, I was working on another project, searching for poetry to set, and as I passed by this poem, it stayed with me.
I wrote Sedgeflowers for Ensemble HereNowHear, pianists Ryan MacEvoy McCullough and Andrew Zhou. I first intended it as a companion piece to Stockhausen’s epic two-piano piece, MANTRA, a signature piece in the ensemble’s repertoire. Thinking of Stockhausen’s piece, somehow, this poem came back to mind. The mystical nature of these ancient words reminds me of Stockhausen’s piece: a language that builds itself up from nothing and a primordial sound universe that many commentators have describes as “spiritual.”
In writing a companion piece to such a huge work as MANTRA, the last thing I wanted to do was write a piece that sounded the same. Any program that includes MANTRA will have quite enough avant-garde German expressionism in it already… however beguiling Stockhausen’s musical language may be. Still, the work has several connections to some of the 13 sections of MANTRA: the repeated note motif, experiments with piano resonance, cascading gestures, and various (amplified) acoustic effects that evoke ring modulation, as examples. Sedgeflowers is meant to cast this larger work in relief, while still “pairing” in a culinary sense.
Like most of my pieces, Sedgeflowers begins with practically nothing—a little weed that I might have thrown away. But through a kind of inner monastic cultivation, the weed becomes something special, something striking, and beautiful, like a lotus. Sedgeflowers was commissioned by the Fromm Foundation of Harvard University with additional support from the Corporation of Yaddo. It is dedicated, with much admiration and gratitude to Ryan and Andrew.