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Duo
2026
Baritone
Piano
- Program Notes
- Some songs are written. This one was lived first. Still I Rise in My Own Skin – is an art song set to the composer’s own poetry — a first-person account of coming into the world with nothing but a heartbeat and a name, and being told, somewhere along the way, that even that was too much. The poem does not dress the experience in distance or metaphor. It speaks plainly: of being made to feel invisible, of doors slammed shut, of a self that others tried to extinguish. “Fire does not need permission to burn” is not a boast. It is a fact, hard-learned. The baritone voice carries the full weight of the narrative — grounded, unflinching, human — while the piano moves beneath and around it like memory itself: sometimes tender, sometimes turbulent, never quite still. The Lento opening sets the tone: this is not a triumphant song. It is an honest one. The journey it describes is, as the text admits, “not clean, never straight” — full of contradictions, setbacks, and grief. But by the final measures, as the voice settles on a quiet, resolute “still me,” something has been claimed that no one else can take back.