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This Friday Afternoon (2009)
Song Cycle for High Baritone and Chamber Ensemble
Flute, English Horn, Clarinet, Bassoon, Harp, String Quartet, Baritone Soloist
Poem by Alan Felsenthal
Approximately 19 minutes
View the score (Acrobat Reader required)

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The score to This Friday Afternoon will appear in the premiere issue of Microfilme, a microfilm-only arts journal, later this year. The score will appear in this unusual format alongside the original poem by Alan Felsenthal.

I first heard Alan Felsenthal read his poem This Friday Afternoon at an informal reading session during our residencies at the Atlantic Center for the Arts in 2008. The poets had invited the composers to come hear some of their work one night, and before Alan could get to the end, I knew it was a poem that I had to set to music. It is a wonderfully evocative text, and was great fun to work with. It also talks about Los Angeles in a way that avoids the overplayed cliché of a city without depth that is centered around the entertainment industry and nothing else. I have always felt that this persistent cliché misses the vibrancy and excitement and natural beauty of my home.

The choice of a chamber ensemble was influenced by my desire to have a wider timbral palate with which to work on Alan’s text. There were also some additional external influences. I had recently heard a number of fantastic English Horn solos that had left me wanting to have a chance to really explore that instrument. Also, while at ACA, I was working with Augusta Read Thomas and Bernard Rands. Bernard’s love for and facility with the harp inspired me to improve my own understanding of this complex instrument. I cannot thank harpist Ellie Choate enough for her patience during the writing of this piece when she demonstrated how things worked, and explained why other things wouldn’t work at all.

In many ways, This Friday Afternoon picks up where my earlier work setting texts by Ursula K. Le Guin, Say I Am Not Far Enough, left off in 2003. The texts have a similar depth and beauty to their imagery, and provoked a very similar response in me. In both cases my intent was to form the music around the text, though in the case of This Friday Afternoon, I also played with the original poem a bit to have the text fit in to the form of the music as well.

I am grateful to Alan for allowing me to work with his poem.

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THIS FRIDAY AFTERNOON
original poem by Alan Felsenthal

The view from this age is
lines of blue and white with
orange afternoon
sun through
the window,
lights
in the kitchen, a singing mother.
Is every poem this day's
milk from a flower, a color
outside the window, its death
by rainfall?
Dogs and small
girls, boys who passed long
ago, fine things
and more fine things;
life is everything I have
read. The season is summer
and the sky is my diary;
the clouds this moment
are all I know;
life at a typewriter, a life
spent conquering the flying page
and somewhere
fields of fuzz, silent
nights, a view of flowering dogwood.
Everywhere is someone’s diary.
A train ride away there is laughing,
children with spoons, other lives
more delicate than mine and
a world of happiness in the yard
under the poplars. These dreams are
more intense in a violet wash.
Los Angeles: I have so much feeling
all I can express are objects,
ideas,
the small nature here,
the seldom trees, but all this light.
Los Angeles has so much light.
There is so much light here.

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