Three Songs on Poems by Lorri Neilsen Glenn

Tawnie Olson

2016

Soprano voice, piano

This song cycle is, in part, a meditation on what it means to be a mortal being who exists in time. The first and last movements each present a different take on looking back, and the cycle moves backward in time from evening to mid-day to dawn. Images from each poem are woven into the music; the first movement is full of sewing imagery, so in places the pianist imitates the ebb and flow of a sewing machine's ostinato. The playful second movement depicts icicles melting, opening with their unpredictable drips. In the third movement, clouds bloom.

Three Songs on Poems by Lorri Neilsen Glenn was commissioned by the Canadian Art Song Project for soprano Magali Simard-Galdès, winner of the Jeunesses Musicales Maureen Forrester Tour. She sang the premiere, with pianist Olivier Hébert-Bouchard, in Waterloo, Ontario at the start of the tour in November 2016. This piece won second prize in the 2018 NATS Art Song Composition Competition.

—Tawnie Olson