DESCRIPTION:
for soprano and cello

Geoff Sheil, composer

Amy Broadbent, soprano
Jonathan Cain, cello


Written for Scott Kluksdahl, July 2012.

http://www.geoffsheil.com

©2012 Islands Press (ASCAP)


Text* adapted by the composer from the 1922 E E Cummings novel of the same name.

***

"Will you shoot?"
"Indeed it would be a big thing of which you might boast all your life: I shot and killed a six-year-old child in a tree."
The Imp, all at once, fell. He hit the muddy ground with a disagreeable thud. The breath was utterly knocked out of him.
[He] began, with the catching of his breath, to howl uproariously. "Don't be sad, my little son, everybody falls out of trees, they're made for that by God".

***

And he struck a match fiercely on the black, almost square boot which lived on the end of his little worn trouser-leg, bending his small body forward as he did so, and bringing the flame upward in a violent curve. The flame settled on his little black pipe, his cheeks sucked until they must have met, and a slow unwilling noise arose, and with the return of his cheeks a small colorless wisp of possibly smoke came upon the air.--"That's not tobacco. Do you know what it is?
And I sit here smoking wood in my pipe when my wife is sick with worrying...."

***

Never have I imagined such a menagerie as had magically instated itself within the erstwhile soggy and dismal four walls of our chamber.

The dying, the sick, the ancient, the mutilated, made their contributions to the common pandemonium.

Never have I seen a greater exhibition of bravery, [...] revolver in hand, holding at bay the snoring and weaponless inhabitants of The Enormous Room.

***

Yet when I examined the moon she too seemed but a painting of a moon and the sky in which she lived a fragile echo of colour. If I blew hard the whole shy mechanism would collapse gently with a neat soundless crash. I must not, or lose all.

***

*all text is in public domain