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Red Shoes (1996)

for percussion and spoken voice
12 minutes

The Red Shoes (Pamela Madsen) commissioned by Patti Cudd, is from The Sexton Cycle, an hour-long cycle of works for soloists, ensembles, and electronics based on the poetry of Pulitzer Prize winning confessional poet Anne Sexton (1928-1974). She was a mad housewife in the fifties who, after giving birth to her child, was dissatisfied with her life. She wrote about the social confusions of growing up in the female body and of living as a woman in postwar American Society. This work conveys the inner duality and conflict of the self with society, as expressed in the poem through the cultural construct as well as through the struggle of the individual performer over the score or the composer. In the course of the work many different struggles of self vs. environment take place which are articulated by how the percussionist speaks in relationship to the multiple layers of percussion on which she is performing. The percussion set-up was constructed out of simple “found” items that were repurposed for use in the work.

To purchase the scores and parts, email Pamela Madsen directly at pmadsen@fullerton.edu.