(Never) Bright Enough
SSA vocal trio
(2021)

Duration: 6 minutes 45 seconds

Premiered by Artemisia Vocal Trio

Premiered May 2021
On-line, Chicago IL, Amherst MA

Yuri Lysoivanov, Artemisia Audio Engineer
Chollette, Artemisia Video Engineer

Composer’s Note

This piece was created as part of Artemisia’s residency at Amherst College in the Spring of 2021. Alexandra, Kaitlin, and Diana worked with the students registered in my composition seminar to create pieces inspired by collective themes of isolation and identity. I wrote this piece in the same time frame as my students as a way to better empathize with their own timelines of completion, to normalize their own hurdles by sharing where and when I got stuck in the process, and to be better connected to them and their work. 

For my students, “isolation” spread into pieces that touch on incarceration, travel, home, exposure, flight, growth, a cage, connection, and space (in many senses of the word). For me, I was pulled into how we can isolate ourselves as an avenue of protection or safeguarding from harm. Andrew Rincón’s play I Wanna Fuck Like Romeo and Juliet taps into the ways we try and protect ourselves from love: loving, being loved. Cupid and Valentine offer two extremes: shielding your heart from everything around and exposing your most vulnerable parts to the sting of fresh air. 

Sharing any part of yourself--composition included--requires a certain risk, a vulnerability, and, as Andrew writes, exposes your inner workings to the world. This piece traverses the quietest, most closed off text and sounds to the full-throated outcries to be heard and accepted. The voices take on myriad roles: leading the charge, passing material back and forth, forging ahead as a unit, spreading to the far reaches and tucking in close and tight. 

To listen to a radio production of Andrew’s play, please visit the Broadway Podcast Network and the Parsnip Ship.

Text

CUPID
Keep your heart tight, small, a ball, a speck, a rain drop. Hide it behind layers of blood and fat, keep it bright enough to read by, never bright enough to expose your inner workings to the world. 

VALENTINE
Rip your chest open, hard and fast, make it as wide as the sky, show the world your insides, your pain, your joy and welcome them like Noah’s arc, one by one, two by two, into the glass museum of your crooked heart. 

// 

CUPID 
Bendito sea, bendito sea, bendito sea tu Corazon que ‘sta lleno de suave lluvia y relámpagos a la vez. 

VALENTINE
Blessed be, blessed be, blessed be your heart filled with soft rain and lightning, all at once.