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GIC to HAR (text: Kenneth Rexroth)
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for high voice and string quartet; 7' (2004)
(commissioned by Mills Music Library, UW-Madison)

​performed by Mimmi Fulmer and a quartet of UW-Madison graduate students:

buy the score:
Published by Classical Vocal Reprints
call to order: 1 800 298-7474

composer’s note:  The library is not only a place where we keep books and periodicals, but an archive of memories, a collection of roads leading to an infinite variety of people and places. In Kenneth Rexroth’s “GIC to HAR,” the poem’s narrator picks up a seemingly boring encyclopedia volume from the library, and is not only sent through space to the banks of Ten Mile Creek, but also back through time to the days of his youth, to the memory of the creek before it became overtaken by pollution. This journey from the pages of a book into the world of long-lost memory feels magical: the dry factual information stored in the encyclopedia becomes a gateway to reviving the personal memories in the reader’s mind, transporting that reader from the library to the banks of the creek. My musical setting of “GIC to HAR” mirrors that transportation from encyclopedia to riverbank, transporting the listener from the concert hall to that remote spot in the woods, laying eyes upon a rose-breasted grosbeak for the first time.

​sample page:

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