a place

for Mezzo-Soprano and Piano

ca. 5 minutes in duration

Premiered on 3/14/19 at the Boston Conservatory at Berklee by Campbell Mann and Yukiko Oba (Piano)

Text by Rabindranath Tagore:

Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high;

    Where knowledge is free;

    Where the world has not been broken up into fragments by narrow domestic walls;

    Where words come out from the depth of truth;

    Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection;

    Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way into the dreary desert sand of dead habit;

    Where the mind is led forward by thee into ever-widening thought and action—

    Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake. 

Musically, I drew the material from a modal approximation of Hindustani That scales. All of the interval relationships are drawn out of these scales, approximated to the nearest equal temperament half-step.