← more from
In a Circle Records
We’ve updated our Terms of Use to reflect our new entity name and address. You can review the changes here.
We’ve updated our Terms of Use. You can review the changes here.

I Will Learn To Love a Person: 4. When I Leave This Place

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

/

  • Streaming + Download

    Includes unlimited streaming via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.
    Purchasable with gift card

      $1 USD  or more

     

  • Buy the Full Digital Album

  • Compact Disc (CD) + Digital Album

    Digipack, beautifully designed by Timo Andres; includes program notes written by Jennifer Gersten.

    Includes unlimited streaming of Christopher Cerrone - The Arching Path (ICR021) via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.
    ships out within 10 days

      $15 USD or more 

     

about

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.

Here as in other movements, the soprano’s line is often echoed by and split between different instruments, suggesting how one’s own head can constitute an echo chamber.

The fourth 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.

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

the distances i have described in my poems
will expand to find me
but they will never find me
when my head touches your head
your face hits my face at the speed of light
holding it a little
i want to cross an enormous distance with you
to learn the wisdom of lonely animals with low IQs
i want to remember you as a river
with a flower on it
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

license

all rights reserved

tags

about

Christopher Cerrone image

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

contact / help

Contact Christopher Cerrone

Streaming and
Download help

Redeem code

Report this track or account

Christopher Cerrone recommends:

If you like Christopher Cerrone, you may also like:

Bandcamp Daily  your guide to the world of Bandcamp

On Bandcamp Radio

Fabiana Palladino stops by to talk about her mesmeric debut LP.
listen now