Philip Carlsen

SATB Chorus

Composer's Note:

This piece was the winner of the Rocky Mountain Chamber Choir’s 2024 Call for Compositions on the theme “Choral Memoirs: Your Story, Your Song.” For the text, I chose one of my own poems, a sonnet about attending a Portland Symphony Orchestra performance of Strauss’s Don Quixote with my dad about a year after my mom died. Watching and hearing the soloist’s final gesture, a dying downward glissando, I had the visceral sensation of playing it myself, entering deeply into the complex emotions of that moment. The sliding sounds in this choral setting are partly inspired by the Tahitian Choir, where the singers may take the chords of missionary hymns and give them a collective pitch-bend, causing the harmony to slip off its moorings. I also incorporate brief quotations from Don Quixote and the cello solo from the Andante of Brahms’s Piano Concerto No. 2.