when birds dream...
for Soprano and Vibraphone
5 min.
“when birds dream...” is a reflection on impressionist music, pioneered and popularized by composers such as Debussy and Ravel. It is a setting of the original poem that inspired Claude Debussy’s famous piano solo “Clair De Lune.” This poem, set in it’s original french, is by Paul Verlaine. In this piece, I aim to step out of my comfort zone, utilizing conventional harmonic functions but twisting them in a refreshing way, all while making the piece still flow in an idiomatic way. The title, “when birds dream...” comes from a line in the last stanza of the poem. It reads:
“Au calme clair de lune triste et beau,
Qui fait rêver les oiseaux dans les arbres”
This roughly translates to:
“The calm light of the moon, sad and fair,
that sets the birds dreaming in the trees”
Using this line as inspiration, I attempted to create a floating soundscape depicting that
exact scene. When the birds are dreaming in the trees, underneath the sad and fair
moonlight.