Psalm 73 was written for the Norfolk New Music Festival at the Yale Summer School of Music. It was written to celebrate the 150th anniversary of Charles Ives’ birth. As such, using texts written by Charles Ives himself was one of the central themes of this project. Along with this, I chose to combine Ives’ texts with the Bible verses from Psalm 73, which is a poignant meditation on injustice, doubt, and the eventual redemption of one’s faith in God.

I. On the Goodness of God

The first song titled “On the Goodness of God” combines the following two juxtaposing poems: Majority, a hopeful message about the eventual advent of God’s kingdom, and Immortality, a sorrowful lament of the death of the poet’s daughter. I combined these two texts along with Psalm 73 to make a narrative structure around the five stages of grief. The poet first tries to deny the death of his daughter, after which he projects his anger towards God. Then, he tries to bargain or negotiate with his current situation. In the climax, he is at a state of utter depression, crying out “My God, my God, my strength!”. And finally, he accepts that all will be well with the world with God in His heaven.

II. The Cage

On the contrary, the second song titled “The Cage” is a whimsical and ironic, yet also nihilistic depiction of the evils of the world. Embodying the eclectic spirit of Ives, I decided to incorporate elements of heavy metal, progressive rock, and techno into this movement. In fact, one of the core features of Ives’ art song is the repeated measures in the introduction. Using this feature, I transformed the art song into a sort of loop station, in which the elements of the composition gradually build on top of each other through a process of constant repetition and continues to build until it cannot sustain itself and falls apart on its own weight. This movement is also a palimpsest on the original composition of Ives, The Cage. As such, the palimpsest takes the original text-setting of Ives verbatim and scrambles the words to create a nonsense poem in the text, as if to depict the leopard’s, or the artist’s, gradual descent into madness.