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I Will Learn To Love a Person: 2. Eleven Page Poem, Page III

from Christopher Cerrone - The Arching Path (ICR021) by Christopher Cerrone

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about

I Will Learn To Love a Person is a setting of five poems by the writer Tao Lin, a sort of early poet laureate of Logging On, whose work attests to the banality of overconnectedness. Lin often ponders the contradiction inherent to life in the digital age, how it is possible to feel at once overexposed and unnoticed to the point of vanishing. Like Whitman, Lin’s speaker sings himself—but his “i” is lowercase, flattened by the weight of an overbearing universe.

Cerrone’s setting amplifies the sites at which feeling leaks out of Lin’s guarded prose.

The second movement features the ensemble burbling alongside the soprano, with bowed percussion and piano sounding at the pitches of her musings on the superficiality of fame and relationships. “i have moved beyond meaninglessness, far beyond meaninglessness / to something positive, life-affirming, and potentially best-selling,” the soprano crows in “eleven page poem, page iii,” crescendoing with the musicians as she ascends to the movement’s highest pitch at “potentially best-selling.”

What follows is one of the work’s most potent episodes: Cerrone’s treatment of “I’ll be right back,” the line concluding the poems in the second and fourth movements. In both, Cerrone renders Lin’s promise to brb quite literally broken: “i’ll be right,” the soprano says, with piano crashing steadily downwards—there is a silence—and then she finishes: “back.” She seems to acknowledge that there is no coming back to a place just as you left it. The ensemble, however, repeats the promise’s final note as though hypnotized.

lyrics

my favorite emotions include ‘brief calmness
in good weather’ and ‘i am the only person alive’
without constant reassurance i feel terribly lonely and insane
i have moved beyond meaninglessness, far beyond meaninglessness
to something positive, life-affirming, and potentially best-selling
i have channeled most of my anger into creating and sustaining an
‘angry face’
i have picked up a medium-size glass of coffee
and used it in the conventional way
because I am conventional in all situations, i’ll be right back

credits

from Christopher Cerrone - The Arching Path (ICR021), released May 21, 2021
Timo Andres, piano
Lindsay Kesselman, soprano
Ian Rosenbaum, percussion
Mingzhe Wang, clarinet

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Christopher Cerrone Brooklyn, New York

Christopher Cerrone (b. 1984) has been commissioned by Los Angeles Philharmonic, Detroit Symphony, and the Cincinnati Symphony, among others and his opera Invisible Cities was a finalist for the 2014 Pulitzer Prize. He was nominated for 2020 and 2022 Grammy Awards. He lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. ... more

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