About

Arrangement: for soprano and chamber ensemble (4-5 players)
Edition Type: score
Publisher: Composers Edition
Catalogue Number: ce-alb1d1
Pages: 64
Date Published: 29th Mar 2022

A rarely performed and raucous postmodern ode emanating from the frontlines of the sexual battlefield, Dish, based on Jessica Hagedorn’s evocative poetry, invites freewheeling textual commentaries and embellishments. These appear as fragments of responses to late 1980’s interviews I conducted with strangers in New York’s Central Park about their go-to ‘pick-up’ lines, and as clips of high-voltage improvisations recorded by the poet, an actor, and a boyfriend. As these simultaneities percolate atop relentless drums and bass, the singer expresses a mélange of emotions and unfettered observations, reeling from claustrophobic housework to memories of an unnamed lover to an exuberant devil-may-care freedom. Her ruminations, as she prepares to take a flight, are interrupted by and drawn into a raw flirtatious dialogue. With a shoutout to Eastern mysticism tinged with cynicism, she reminds herself to balance nighttime peregrinations with daytime museum visits when arriving in New York…otherwise, “your reputation as a vampire may blossom.” Soprano Dora Ohrenstein, who commissioned and recorded Dish in 1990, writes in the liner notes that it is the “musical equivalent of a Rauschenberg collage.”

Sheet Music Download

Contents

Download queue