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About the Composer
Timothy C. Takach
Graphite Publishing
Hungry (from This is How You Love)
Passionate music, celebrating a close relationship.
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This is How You Love
SATB a cappella
A surging, honest reflection on the physical closeness of a couple. Opening with a repetitive progression in the tenors and basses, the text declamation in the sopranos and altos is asymmetrical yet natural. Perfectly paced, the piece grows and diminishes with the arc of the poem.
Composer’s Notes
This is an excerpted movement from the larger work This is How You Love, a piece written collaboratively with composer Jocelyn Hagen. In that multi-movement work, we created the libretto and wrote each movement together, but we also got to write our own piece, and this is mine.
One of the parameters we set up for This is How You Love was that we didn’t want to mention gender anywhere in the piece. While that was the best decision for the piece, it did exclude some of our favorite poems from the libretto, including one that was pretty sexy. For a piece about relationships, we didn’t want to leave that physical element out. So I called up William Reichard, a Twin Cities poet with whom I’ve collaborated before, and asked him to write a new text for this spot, and he said yes. He sent me “Hungry” and it was perfect.
There’s an incessant harmonic progession in this piece that is an underpinning for the whole story – a repetitive yearning. The changes in tempo outline an arc, rising and falling with the intensity of the text.
– Timothy C. Takach (2018)
Text
Pulled hot from the dryer,
the flannel sheets turn our bed
into a cocoon, a refuge
where hungry bodies blend.
See how the years together
have turned us softer, and sweet.
And still, there is the keen blade
of our desire, that constant heat.
When our twin bodies meet
under the blankets,
we recognize one another
in a world beyond language,
hand to hand, mouth to mouth,
pressed tightly together as we sleep.
We’re much alike, yet still unique.
When we share a bed, we sing.
– William Reichard, used with permission
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