Snow Angel

Abstract

Abstract Snow Angel is a song cycle for two singers and instrumental sextet that presents the rediscovery and reclamation of personal identity and agency following trauma through the words of Kansas poet Wyatt Townley. Snow Angel represents my current compositional style, synthesizing classical and vernacular idioms to portray a first-person, female perspective of assault and recovery. The work makes use of the dialog and interactions between the soprano and mezzo-soprano to voice the victim’s thoughts and feelings as she processes the experience. The musical material of Snow Angel supports the concept of the cycle through motivic and harmonic means. Throughout the course of the work, recurring musical gestures reappear in different contexts. The first nine songs, though linked, are independent enough to be excerpted for performance independent of the cycle, while the final song is essentially a remix of motives from the other songs and functions as an open-ended postlude that closes the cycle while looking forward to a new beginning.