Program Note:   

Composed in 1987-1988 at the MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, San Francisco, and in New York City, the cycle limns the full course of a brief liaison. Addonizio's characteristically frank, sensually robust poetry is paired with music ranging from the expressionistic to the neo-romantic. Completed in 1988, the cycle was dedicated to Addonizio; it was revised in 1989 and orchestrated for soprano and orchestra. In fall 1989, the sketches of the voice and piano version were thought lost along with a number of other manuscripts, during a move from Greenwich Village to the Upper West Side. All that survived was a single print of the orchestral score. When the company was sold to the Canticle Publishing Group in fall 2015, E.C. Schirmer returned to Hagen a number of his manuscripts that had been found in storage at their facility in Boston. After singing and playing through the cycle, Hagen lightly revised the manuscript, engraved it, and presented it to University of Nevada Las Vegas faculty artists Stephanie Weiss and Christina Wright-Ivanova.