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About the Composer

Jennifer Lucy Cook

Jennifer Lucy Cook (she/her) is a composer and lyricist based in Los Angeles. Jen specializes in music for the stage and screen, choral music, and pop songwriting. Recent choral commissions include Cantorum Chamber Choir, Choral Arts Ensemble in Minnesota, and the Utah Valley University Chamber Choir. She is the recipient of the Edwin Fissinger Composition...

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Graphite Publishing

For You I Will Be An Island

Name: For You I Will Be An Island
SKU: GP-C011
Availability: InStock
Rating: 5.00 (1 reviews)

Jennifer Lucy Cook

A deeply expressive and colorful new work for advanced choir.

Difficulty: 5

Duration: 3-5 min.

GP-C011

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for SATB div. a cappella choir

Sometimes simple adjectives best describe a piece: Bold, imaginative, fearless, expressive. These words all apply to Cook’s unaccompanied “For You I Will be an Island.” She opens the piece with an instantly memorable melody in the soprano voice, built around that melancholy interval, the minor 6th Passages of wordless chorus and delicate use of extreme tessituras result in a piece that is brilliantly “orchestrated” for voices.

Composer’s Notes

“For You I Will Be An Island” was written while in quarantine, when the greatest act of love that one person could show to another was to keep a healthy distance. This strange phenomenon stood in stark contrast to the tangible way I normally prefer to show love: with hugs, kisses, and closeness. Quarantine felt to me very similar to other rare times when distance means love, like when a relationship seems to have run its course, or when love isn’t returned in kind. When all that’s left to do is to keep a flame and wish them well from afar: “find me where love collides with letting go.” In the piece you’ll hear waves humming all the words left unsaid, the voices dividing with the widest intervals possible before coming back together for clusters, and long phrases that stretch for miles. It is my hope that “For You I Will Be An Island” can evoke the strange beauty in loneliness, in whatever form it shows up for you.

– Jennifer Lucy Cook