Recovering

Duration:

ca. 6 minutes

Vocal Range:

Tenor (original): D3 – G♯4
Soprano: D4 – G♯5
Mezzo-soprano: C♭4 – F5

Program Notes

Recovering was written for my friend, Thomas Young, in memory of his wife, Marilyn Helinek. It is a setting of two poems by Muriel Rukeyser, including two lines from “The Poem as Mask: Orpheus” and the entirety of “Recovering”. The second poem is framed by a musical quotation which brings out an inner voice and modifies the opening of J. S. Bach’s chorale, Es ist das Heil uns kommen her (Now is to Us Salvation Come).

Jan Heller Levi, in A Remembrance of Muriel Rukeyser (1913-1980) published in the Sarah Lawrence College Bulletin May 1980, wrote that “Muriel, like no one else, proved to us that recovery—recovery of what has been lost or what has been denied us—is the true work of poetry and of our lives.”