The Trouble with the Text

This is my comic cantata on an amusing prose poem by my friend Claire Bateman, in which 24 students in a creative writing class make various excuses – all of them lame – for why they didn’t do the assigned reading. It’s an acute study in verbose teenage rationalization.

More or less following the conventions of an early 18th-century chamber cantata, the music resembles the style of George Frideric Handel – on a bad day. I doubt I will ever do another project like this, but it was great fun to do once! Thanks go to the performers and their teachers at the FAC, John Ravnan (strings) and Dr. Brittnee Siemon (voice). Special Thanks to Dr. Tom Strange for the loan of the 1748 Kirkman spinet harpsichord for the basso continuo.

I. Overture
II. Recitative: The Pages Kept Changing Places
III. Aria: The Book Was Too Faddish
IV. Recitative: The Key Didn’t Fit the Lock
V. Ground Bass: The Spine Had Been Punctured
VI. Chorus: Esperanto
VII. Recitative: The Book Was So Heavy
VIII. Aria: The Book Was So Light
IX. Arioso: The Book Was Too Amnesiac
X. Chorus: Nothing More To Be Said!

Naomi Henn, soprano
Alexandra Gravina, mezzo-soprano
Taylor Lomax, baritone
Marc Pitois and Sarah Davis, violins
Jotham Rosen, viola; Michael Hartman, ‘cello
Yu Jung Jeon. Harpsichord