Douglas Geers
Little Sleep's-Head Sprouting Hair in the Moonlight
Play it! Hear an excerpt from this work. (Realaudio)
Little Sleep's-Head Sprouting Hair in the Moonlight (1993-94) is a
22-minute cycle of seven songs for baritone, guitar, and mixed electronics. The song texts are
from one of the set of ten meta-poems in a volume entitled "The Book of Nightmares"
by Galway Kinnell, the Erich Maria Remarque Professor in
Creative Writing at New York University
and former State Poet of Vermont. This book as a whole deals with
ideas of and feelings about mortality; the section "Little Sleep's-Head..."
centers around a scene in which Kinnell comforts his infant daughter and
imagines
both her and his future.
The electronic part in this piece acts merely as a frame to the live performers: It begins
before they do, fades out during the songs, and then fades back in near the end
of each song. The electronic content is mostly processed vocal and guitar
sounds,
sometimes placed over ambient noises such as a playground and a restaurant. As
a frame for the "real" music, the electronic part is much less
interactive with the
live musicians than in most "tape" and instrument pieces. In fact, this
piece has even been performed without the electronic part.
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piece.
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