An Art Song Set——Two Poems by Emily Dickinson(2025)

May-Flower
The first song in this set, May-Flower, captures the delicate beauty of Emily Dickinson’s poetic imagery with a vibrant yet refined musical language. The piece begins with a flowing texture of 32nd notes, interwoven with pentatonic arpeggios that serve as ornamental flourishes throughout. These elements create a sense of lightness and movement, evoking the gentle unfolding of nature’s wonders. In contrast to the more ethereal second song, May-Flower maintains a direct and lyrical character, with colorful shifts in melody and harmonic nuance that highlight the poem’s celebration of spring’s quiet splendor.

I Went to Heaven
In I Went to Heaven, the music takes on a more surreal and otherworldly quality, mirroring the poem’s dreamlike vision. At the opening, dense harmonic clusters symbolically evoke the tolling of heavenly bells, marking the protagonist’s arrival in an unearthly realm. The shifting timbres, shaped through continuous harmonic transformations, reflect the nuances of the text, with harmonics in the upper register lending an ethereal glow to the atmosphere. The interplay of these sonorities crafts a space that feels both distant and intangible, beyond the realm of earthly existence, embodying the mystique and transcendence of Dickinson’s words.