Jeffrey Ryan: This Exact Shade of Moon (World Premiere) | Leslie Fagan & Penderecki String Quartet

This Exact Shade of Moon (World Premiere) for soprano and string quartet Music by Jeffrey Ryan (b. 1962) Poems by Yusuf Saadi Performed by: Leslie Fagan, soprano Penderecki String Quartet Jerzy Kaplanek, violin Jeremy Bell, violin Christine Vlajk, viola Katie Schlaikjer, cello Chapters 0:00 – Introduction 4:06 – I. Painting a February Sky 8:27 – II. Meditation (Waxing Moon) 9:35 – III. Love Sonnet for Light 14:05 – IV. Meditation (Full Moon) 15:08 – V. If Van Gogh Worshipped the Moon 19:10 – VI. Meditation (Waning Moon) 20:32 – VII. Reading Borges on the Moon 23:48 – VIII. Meditation (New Moon) 25:30 – IX. Flowers on Europa This Exact Shade of Moon Poems by Yusuf Saadi All poems taken from the collection Pluviophile by Yusuf Saadi, published by Nightwood Editions and ©2020 Yusuf Saadi. Used by permission of the poet. These poems may be reprinted in performance programmes or otherwise made available to an audience. A Word document to help facilitate this is available by contacting the composer via jeffreyryan.com. Painting a February Sky On this palette, will mixing black and violet uncover the nameless colour tipping over the horizon, grief entering sky's consciousness, dark-plum wine spilled and bleeding from the other sides of the canvas? My body lured to marvel at its secondary colours, to trace this page's primary words. When I mix this much love with drops of despair, do I create heartbreak, inertia? Do I arrive at what I'm becoming? Words, like colours, have gravity, they exert pull, break in each other's wakes. Isn't all matter subject to gravity? Yes, but not like this. The way words pull you into me, like faith stirred by desire. To gather art to its primary source—search for what has no name. Look up: mystery, distance, beauty mix alchemically to unveil this exact shade of moon. Love Sonnet for Light I know a star in Andromeda broke every colour in your heart. That you shivered yourself to sleep in a meteor's crevice or moon's crater whose dust is now my skin. Beyond my finitude you dream a wave and particle at once. Know I love the way you warm my fingers, pour gilt on my hardwood floors, bear the universe's stories through bedroom windows. I wish I could touch you— not like two electrons repulsing, nor within the semiotics of language, but hold you how I hold a hand when I'm afraid— and close my eyes when you're naked. If Van Gogh Worshipped the Moon Desperate for paint—as the moon's starved white ribs through your louvred window demand their sacrifice. You disregard its signs until night's corvine feathers begin to fall across your mind. Or an autumn leaf, bistre and wine-red, a rare beauty. Alone with Theo's letters on night so long—each word stranded between pure image and pure song. Starlight drips across your pain. Moonlight walks on water. And colours the only gods to ever be: a saffron sunrise on the sapphire sea. Reading Borges on the Moon Its darkened face is lucent. Craters laddered and cliffs escalatored. Electric boardwalk to sublunar oceans: a stroll in a light gravity. You remembered un bruñido disco in your poetry but your moon is not my moon. The one Plato marvelled at when he respited from his nycto- phobia. A burnt corona that blinded Homer who couldn't spurn the beautiful. Or the madder moon's omen in the sky after the battle of Badr. Dreamtigers prowled among poachers of starlight. In the future I find a field of deserted moonrock and sit on a beach chair at dusk to read Borges. Or to gaze at the Earth—a moon to me now—scorched white from the old fires. Flowers on Europa Autumn leaves don't crackle; skylarks never sing; a touch of rainfall breaks the bed. Do daffodils dissolve in your unpractised inner eye? Each tulip spoor clichéd, the orchids picked and roses dead. Tonight I grow a darkness in my head. Imagine frozen plumes above Europa: the creaking ice is musical. The sun's iotas feed extremophiles. And undiscovered flowers flare within the doldrums. Glowing petals shock the frost and sepals hug themselves for warmth. The anthers drug the moon with blanched light—imagined from our window while we waste the night.