The Manhattan School of Music Contemporary Opera Ensemble will perform the trio from Act 1, Scene 1 of Protectress the OPERA on May 4 and 5 at the Ades Performance Space in New York! Full info here.
And if you haven’t yet read the novella the opera is based on, you can order it from amazon in print or for Kindle or directly from the publisher, Unsolicited Press.
Check out the details about the Cardboard Opera in Broadway World!
Jessica Rudman‘s just posted our latest team news, but I’ll sum up here, too. Voices of Concinnity, a chamber choir affiliated with the Consonare Choral Community, will be recording our “Shadow Reel to Last Breath.” “Shadow Reel” is part of a three-song set I wrote for Jessica called A Forest that is a Desert; the other two movements–“In the Stony Mountains” and “Hospice”–were premiered by the Choral Arts Initiative in 2019. The texts are about the death of my mother in October 2018. During her last week, I sat by her in her bedroom in the little house she loved in the mountains of North Carolina. I read to her, mostly from Lord of the Rings, her greatest book love, and sometimes we talked. Hospice nurses came and went through the days and nights.
Here is the text:
“Shadow Reel to Last Breath”
There is no revelation
in her vexed words, lost sleep,
the catch in her throat.
Shadows reel about the room
where a lamp is always on,
a little sun.
We turn her body,
turn her sheets,
take turns around her bed.
We walk,
with anarchy and darkness
on the clock,
an arc.
Rock, and step, and circle.
Listen, listen,
her speech is rough
and loose.
We keep our tears silent
and our gazes blank.
The hour comes round at last.
