Love is a place (2015)

1. somewhere i have never traveled
2. love is a place
3. i carry your heart

SATB div.
(text: E.E. Cummings – in English)
7 min.

In this set of love songs after one of the great poets of the genre, I wanted to create a sense of progression from various phases of that universal feeling – falling in love, building a life with a partner, the birth of children, death and loss – but one in which the individual songs could describe any of these stages, and sometimes several. The pleasing ambiguity of Cummings’ love poetry, the way in which much of it could be addressed to a lover, a parent, a child, is one of its greatest strengths. The three songs all hover around the approximate key of D major and employ the same soft harmonic palette. The variations in texture are meant to evoke Cummings’ idiosyncratic graphic layout, punctuation, and constant parenthetical commentary within his lines, as well as to distill the essence of each mood. somewhere i have never travelled is a rhapsodic part song. love is a place is suspended in a blissful, near-timeless haze, and I carry your heart is an easy polyphonic ballad.

love is a place was commissioned by the Dominante choir and their conductor, Seppo Murto, for their 40th anniversary, and is dedicated to them.

Published by Fennica Gerhman.