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Elizabeth Alexander
Elizabeth Alexander (Seafarer Press)
Why I Pity the Woman Who Never Spills
A gutsy, sensual song in praise of messy women.
SSAA a cappella
A gutsy, sensual blues setting of Joan Wolf Prefontaine’s poem in praise of messy women. Opening with waves of “spilling” words — spill, splatter, spot, spree, dribble, drabble, oozle — this piece is a rambunctious journey through a world of vocal inflections and joie de vivre, to be sung with nuance and abandon.
(Commissioned by Cornell University Women’s Chorus as part of its “No Whining, No Flowers” Commissioning Project)
Composer’s Notes
As they become more and more familiar with this song, individual singers often begin adding blues inflections to some of the A-naturals, either flattening the pitches so that they lie “in the cracks,” or singing the pitches as actual A-flats. This is especially true in spots like m.85 (“Levis and lips”) where the lyrics contains a little “attitude.” When I was composing this song, I considered writing some of these renegade A-naturals as A-flats, but I rejected that idea because they aren’t true A-flats; they really are “blues-inflected-A-naturals!”
Although choral singing is usually about singers making their vocal production as similar as possible, this piece is not about conformity — so don’t try to make your gals bend these pitches uniformly. I suggest that they lean on those A-naturals with as much moxy as they feel on a given day, and see what happens!
– Elizabeth Alexander
Text
For she misses the luxury of dribbling
marinara sauce on white silk,
of merlot falling at uproarious dinner
parties onto beige lace tablecloths,
picnics where mustard, baked beans,
toasted marshmallows and melted
chocolate all leave their winsome,
gregarious stains on Levis and lips.
For she misses the thrill and mess of it all:
hands infatuated with bread dough,
logic blemished all day with sly innuendoes
and double entendres, the child in the lap
with the histrionic green lime popsicle kiss,
the kettle with its secret military spices
longing in its heart of hearts to spill the beans,
mangos eaten au natural in bathtubs,
sweet-talking, profane juices softening
the millstones and milestones of the body,
the plum’s intemperate noddings in a neighbor’s
nonchalant field, tartness oozing like ink
across obeisant fingers, strawberries,
caught red-handed in golden-straw beds,
falling upwards towards one’s mouth
small, fierce advocates of sumptuous rendezvous.
I say to her: Spill, Spurt, Squirt, Splash, Splatter,
Spot, Spree, Sprinkle, Dribble, Drabble, Oozle,
Offend, Transcend, Transude, Transgress, Transpire,
Perspire, Percolate, Partake, Propagate, Create!
– Joan Wolf Prefontaine
© by Joan Wolf Prefontaine.
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