harp and 4 percussion
Based on a poem by Jim Carroll, antiphonal percussionists playing hand crank music boxes, buckets of water, prayer bowls and various other Lenses is scored for antiphonal percussion quartet and harp. The percussionists use crank music boxes with melodies written by the composer, Japanese prayer bowls (rin), large crystal glasses, various wind chimes, and buckets of water. The work is based on a poem of the same name by Jim Carroll.
Lenses
By Jim Carroll
Each night she comes to me, places the glass from her eyes
Into a small green box with mirrors. Music down the living
darkness begins. Some low-eyed Rastafarians, fingers sharp
and gleaming as the knives inside suns, enter the room in
lines. They lay hands like machetes across steel drums and
chant the deep orange. There is power there is sweetness
there is parallel light.
Within her heat, the glass above the bed turns to violent
water and I lift her up the moment before the drowning. I set
her loose. I pull her back again. No one knows none of them
could ever know. It is not for learning or love, these dreams
and their actions. It is our way of surviving
When it is finished, the chanters throw their headdress into
the hollow flux. They take up flutes and strings to give music
to exhaustion. The speed of each dream can turn on me then
under these rapid lids. The symbols of elements pass by me;
it is only some clever women in disguise. Their bones are so
sharp; they can break through their own excuses. And we
sleep when the music is done, with our wrists resting in the
holes their children have dug beside us in the sand.