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What the Thunder Said (2024)

from Fragments from the Wasteland

for alto saxophone and percussion (with speaking)
9 minutes

Commission/Premiere Info: Premiered on November 6, 2024 by Bent Frequency

This work is from my large-scale concert-length five-movement work Fragments from the Wasteland, a music-drama in text and music and consortium-commission based on a re-interpretation of T.S. Eliot’s poem, “The Wasteland” (1922), juxtaposed with selected “mask” poems of a contemporary female poet Edna St. Vincent Millay. Written for loadbang ensemble, Brightwork newmusic, HEX Vocal Ensemble, Galan Trio, and Bent Frequency, the work culminates in a final chamber concerto. What the Thunder Said, composed for Bent Frequency (sax and percussion), recontextualizes the final poem from T.S. Eliot’s modernist masterpiece with commentary by the contemporary women poet Edna St. Vincent Millay’s “Second April” (1921): Weeds and Ebb. In these works I explored the sources of my own compositional craft—as a woman composer, educated in the age of modernist techniques of abstraction. I sought to contextualize the influences of modernism on my own work, with a language of melodic expressionism and an evolving translated “language”: of text into music. A historical drama emerges through the setting of T.S. Eliot’s poem “The Wasteland” with selected works referenced in Eliot’s text as well as “mask” poems by women poets, including Edna St. Vincent Millay, Sarah Teasdale, Elinor Wylie.

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

November 7, 2024 | Bent Frequency at San Jose State University, CA
November 6, 2024 | Bent Frequency in Meng Concert Hall, Cal State Fullerton

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