Purchase a print copy from:

Transfiguration, a setting of a poem by Djuna Barnes commissioned by the Saarbruecken Festival for the soprano Lucy Shelton, with an ensemble of flute, harp, and percussion, formally investigates and echoes the processes depicted in the poem. The poem explores the universal theme of the natural cycle of birth-death-rebirth, but reversed in time. Secondarily, metaphorical references to the Transfiguration of Christ are literally or figuratively implied.

There are three sections: a brief Prologue, Deconstruction, and Reconstruction. In the second section (Deconstruction), the nine stanzas of the poem are initially reordered according to an elaborate mathematical scheme. Each stanza is represented by key phonemes, words, or fragments from the verses, often vocalized by the instrumentalists. Lines from verse or prose by Picasso, Dante (“Commedia”), Margery of Kempe, Tom o’Bedlam’s Song (referred to in Shakespeare’s “King Lear,” ) and the Bible (Ecclesiastes) are interwoven as commentary, and sung by the soprano.

After all nine verses from the Barnes poem have made their fragmentary appearances, the poem is then set as written (Reconstruction, the third section), yet embedded with references back to the fragmented first ‘pass’ through the disordered verses. Throughout the piece, the words from Barnes' poem and from the extraneous commentaries are extracted, dissected, and sonically explored, so that the collective sound energies contribute to and illuminate the trajectories of the poem as it regenerates itself.

---Anne LeBaron