When Lucy Dhegrae approached me to write a song for her and Nathaniel LaNasa
I agreed immediately. The next day, a fake John Ashbery tweet provided the seed
for what was to become Anyway, where threads go, it all goes well. I felt this text
was beautifully ambiguous in its potential meaning. The text was also a perfect
metaphor for my creative process, which involves freely weaving together different
kinds of musical “threads.” Often I find that these musical threads truly can go
in any direction, and despite the finitude of the direction ultimately chosen, it all
seems to work out. The text is set in such a way that the words are deconstructed
into their constituent parts. The small bits of language playfully melt into the
piano’s sounds, sometimes offering the sense that a new language is emerging.
Perhaps it is fitting that a robot poet spurred such an entropic mutation to take place.
World Premiere
May 25, 2017
The Church of the Intercession
New York, New York
Lucy Dhegrae, soprano
Nathaniel LaNasa, piano