In late 2017, my friend Madison Daley sent me a poem she’d written about her experience camping in Mount Rainier National Park, Washington. The poem inspired me, reminding me of my time in Yellowstone National Park in 2012, and I decided to use the text for an impressionistic soprano and piano setting. The piano provides a vivid description of the scene, as if the soprano herself is sitting under the stars, overwhelmed in awe of the colossal universe.

To me, the poem is not only a deep appreciation of nature, but a major depiction of the human perspective on Earth. Everything in the narrator’s view is more than it seems; the narrator feels at one with everything, and no matter how loud she shouts, her voice is a mere whisper into the sky. The poem describes the Earth as a living, breathing entity, calling out to the stars, crying. Humanity consumes everything that the planet gives us, hurting it (and therefore ourselves), but ultimately becoming one with it all in the end.

The scene opens up with a light twinkling of stars in the clear night sky (no una corda pedal yet), unsettlingly unable to find a tonal center, just as one can never focus directly on a star without it fading from sight. The solitary E-flats in the bass are the Earth, keeping the soloist grounded. The large octave swashes literally depict the shape of mountains in the score, sounding as if the mountains are reaching up to the stars. These teasingly reach back, appearing closer than they really are. The swirls of metamorphic rock in the mountain morph into a rushing waterfall that pools into a lake at the mountain’s base. The line “Women are laced between trees…” is set to a twelve-tone row, imitated by multiple voices in the piano part that twist and bend around each other. The E-flat (D-sharp now) returns, fighting to keep the narrator down to Earth, but eventually compromising with a B-flat, allowing the twisted harmonies to fade out peacefully. Immediately following is a dreamy, reflective moment of true classic twelve-tone serialism, based on transpositions and inversions of the previous soprano melody. Very slowly, the waters in the lake seem to boil back to reality as the soloist comes back from her thoughts. She howls along with the wolves, and with the return of the arpeggiated arcs in the right hand, the mountains try to wrench themselves from the Earth to reach the skies. With one final sweep, the Earth splits for a brief second, then comes crashing back down for a landing. The stars, finally settling on tonality, continue to twinkle eternally above, watching the Earth and everything on it age, evolve, live, die, and be reborn.

Madison Daley currently is a liberal arts student focusing on Environmental Policy and writing at Sarah Lawrence College in Yonkers, New York.

Emily Curto, soprano

B. T. Nylander, Piano