For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand...
So I was gonna post about something totally different, and then--an Eric Whitacre piece came up on shuffle! I remembered that I hadn't checked his awesome blog for ages, and went off to make up for lost time. Last time I'd checked it, he'd announced that he'd started taking commissions again (YES!), and was working on a piece called 'The Stolen Child', from the text of the Yeats poem by the same name. Imagine my infinite joy when I checked again, and not only had he finished it, but had also finished another piece called 'The Seal Lullaby', about which he had this to say:
My great friend Amy Arms, who sang a beautiful solo at the concert last night, asked me after she heard The Seal Lullaby if I had been listening to Danny Elfman lately. (The ending of The Seal Lullaby has a pretty obvious tip of the hat to one of my favorite film scores of all time, Edward Scissorhands.) I laughed, and told her yes, of course I had. The truth is, though, that it’s almost impossible to write a I-iii chord progression anymore without it immediately making you think of that movie, or at the very least, Christmas. Personally, I like it because it sounds shy, and melancholy, and filled with longing - just like Johnny Depp as Edward Scissorhands, and just like the little baby seal in Kipling’s story.
<3 Yes, the I-iii progression is rather that way, and he listens to Danny Elfman. Of course he does. And his wife--I most definitely have a musical crush on his lovely wife. Hila Plitmann is just beautiful, look at her myspace. And he brings news that she sang a new work which gives: "a full hour of the most lush, most bombastic, most tender music, all while the soprano speaks, sings, and screams the last chapter of Alice in Wonderland." (After which he speaks in the most glowing terms about Hilary Hahn's performance in the same concert. Can you see why I love these people???) *swoons*