CarrieAnne Winter, Soprano
Jonathan Chapman Cook, Piano
Live performance recorded on April 14th, 2007 in Dalton Recital Hall at Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo MI.

Translations by Kenneth Rexroth:

I.
From the beginning
I knew meeting could only
End in parting, yet
I ignored the coming dawn
And I gave myself to you.

Fujiwara no Teika (12th century)

II.
In the mountain village
The snow falls ceaselessly.
The paths are obliterated.
He would be truly devoted
Who visited me today.

Taira no Kanemori (10th century)

III.
In the dusk
The road is hard to see.
Wait 'till moonrise,
So I can watch you go.

Oyakeme, a Girl of Buzen
(8th Century, from the Manyoshu)

Note from the composer:

If a writer were to set his or her own text to music, it would probably turn out very differently than if another composer (especially if this composer lived hundreds of years later!) were to set the poem. A friend of mine recently suggested that one of the functions of setting a poem to music is to make the text more complex.  A work of art takes on expanded dimensions when multiple artists treat the same material from different experiences, aesthetic tastes, and ideals.  In my own treatment of these beautiful old poems from Japan, I sought to convey the emotional quality of the text from the inside of my own experience with the poems.

The first poem is both a song of love and a song of lost love, an expression of bliss and an expression of embitterment.  In the second song, the piano at first plays the impressionistic role of falling, swirling snow in the mountains.  The nature of snowfall as pure and beautiful, however, transforms with the narrators frustration with his inevitably unfulfilled desire for a visitor (likely a lover) into an expressionistic device of human frustration.  The third song, I will allow to express itself.  This poem is one of the most moving in all of the literature I have read.  After over a hundred readings, I still feel shivers when I read it, and hold back the tears.

~Jonathan Chapman Cook