I Think I Should Have Loved You

2023 . for high voice, flute, alto saxophone, and max patch . 6’15 .

In I Think I Should Have Loved You, I incorporate fragments of texts from early 20th century women writers to create a collage of a single moment. In writing the piece for small ensemble and electronics, I feel this constant push and pull between the greater aural reality of disembodied voices and the visual reality of three humans alone onstage. The flute and saxophone act both in tandem with and as foils to the voice, twirling and echoing like ghosts of those who have spoken these thoughts before. The electronics often become indistinguishable with the instruments, so that this greater whole is one and the same with its parts. This piece came as I was reading through anthologies of early 20th century women poets over one summer. These writers, many of whom were my age at the time they were writing, were searching for the same answers I am searching for in my own work. They were looking around themselves and writing about the natural world, housework, mundane happenings of life, etc. (topics that were quote-un-quote appropriate for women to be discussing), and they were searching for God in the details.

Text

Last night
I watched a star fall like a great pearl into the sea, / (- The Star by Lola Ridge)
Fairy palace of pink and pearl
Frescoed with filligree silver-white, / (- The Sea-Shell by Virna Sheard)
The earth is motionless
And poised in space / (- Interim by Lola Ridge)
I feel the great immensity of life.
All little aims slip from me, and I reach
My yearning soul toward the Infinite. . . .
I see the stars above me, world on world:
I hear the awful language of all Space; / (- Life by Ella Wheeler Wilcox)
Red mouth; flower soft,
Your soul leaps up—and flashes
Star-like, white, flame-hot. / (- You! Inez! by Alice Dunbar-Nelson)
She drew a line there, in the centre.
It was done; it was finished. / (- To the Lighthouse by Virginia Wolfe)
A ghost in marble of a girl you knew
Who would have loved you in a day or two. / (- I Think I Should Have Loved You Presently by Edna St. Vincent Millay)