Until I Became Human (2006) |
I. Violin (Excerpt)

Performers:
Jamie Maletz, mezzo-soprano
Anne Black, viola
Dinosaur Annex
Community Music Center of Boston Youth Orchestra

Until I Became Human is the result of a community-based initiative between veteran new music ensemble Dinosaur Annex and the amateur players of the Community Music Center of Boston Youth Orchestra. Dinosaur Annex commissioned the piece for their 4th Annual Young Composers Festival, and the two ensembles – along with eighteen-year-old Boston Arts Academy senior Jamie Maletz -- premiered it February 4, 2007.

The work sets the first and last poems of the four-poem cycle entitled Chrysalis by young American poet Ivanna Yi. I met Ms. Yi while studying at Yale, and she wrote the cycle expressly for me to set to music. Inspired by the poet’s past struggle to choose between life as an aspiring concert violinist and her passion for writing poetry, Chrysalis is a meditation on the anguish and self-revelation inherent in coming to terms with one’s dreams.

When I was asked to write this piece, these poems came to mind. In addition to their natural musicality, they speak to the creative process, and the mutually transformative relationship between an artist and his or her object of expression. In both poems, we hear the voice of the subject itself – the violin in “Violin,” or the would-be poem within “Chrysalis” – and each undergoes transformation: a violin discovers its singing voice, a poem metamorphoses into a human. But each poem leaves us wondering where the subject ends and the poet begins; the line is blurred, leading us to question whether they're one and the same.

The creative process seemed a fitting theme for a project designed to bring together artists whose stripes differ widely but who share a common passion for creating music. But more specifically, I identified with the poems’ author/subject ambiguity. I wanted to write music that sounded like it could come from all of us – not just me, or one particular subset of us, but from the whole quirky, motley ensemble: brave young amateurs, emerging conservatory talents, die-hard new music veterans, a virtuoso violist, and an eighteen-year-old Broadway-bound singer-songwriter. Perhaps, then, creating something larger than the sum of its parts, this ensemble of seemingly incongruous components might find its voice and discover it’s just as natural as any other.

Until I Became Human
Select Poems from Chrysalis, by Ivanna Yi

I. Violin

I am the last remnant of myself,
a fragment of who I have been.

In a former life I was a tree.
When I was cut down, the birds fled
to weave a black net above the forest.

No one else mourned for me.
Locked in a miniature coffin,
I grieved alone. In my solitude
my voice became my companion.

With age my voice grows deep and sweet.
When I take root in the arms of a human
being, I do not regret my death.

II. Chrysalis

The poem I have not written
comes to me in my sleep,
a woman dressed in white.

I have been waiting for you,
I tell her. After all this time,
why are you still unwritten?

Without shame, she slips out of her dress.
I tried to become a poem, she says,
until I became human.