Sigh

This piece for double-SATB choir is based upon Lewis Carroll’s 1865 book Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland in more ways than one. The original text is transformed through “blackout poetry”—selecting particular words and phrases from a text and erasing the rest to create a new story. Specifically, Sigh creates blackout poetry of passages where “sigh”, “sighing”, or “sighed” are used. Rather than tell of Alice’s whimsical journey, it is the tragic tale of a pitiful man consumed by sadness. He grieves, sobs, and laughs hysterically, something that baffles the speaker, causing them to simultaneously want to help and avoid this man. The chord progression is also developed from the appearance of “sigh” in Carroll’s original text. Depending on its frequency in a passage, its tense/case variation, and the chapter number, a three-to-six note chord could be derived from a twelve-tone set. These were then expanded and developed into the harmonic structure of the piece.