THE WOMAN TURNS HERSELF INTO A FISH (2004)

for female vocal trio or three-part choir (SSA, TTB)
Duration: ca. 5:30

Text by Eavan Boland

Commissioned, premiered and recorded by Trio Eos
(Michele Kennedy, Kathryn Mulvihill, Jenna-Claire Kemper)

Premiere: November 15th, 2005 at 6pm at St. Paul's Chapel, Columbia University, NYC as part of a Trio Eos concert.

Received honorable mention in the 2005 ASCAP Foundation/Morton Gould Young Composers Awards. A recording appeared in the 2005 issue of Palimpsest, a Yale arts magazine.

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Trio Eos, recorded in 2005 by StudioTeo in New Haven, CT

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April 2012 performance by the Mt. Holyoke Chamber Singers, directed by Lindsay Pope

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November 2013 performance at Tufts U. by members of C4

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PROGRAM NOTE:

When I was looking for a text for this piece, Kate Mulvihill (one of the sopranos in the trio) suggested the Irish poet Eavan Boland. After reading through a lot of her work (great stuff by the way), I came across this poem and looked no further.

TEXT:

The Woman Turns Herself into a Fish

Unpod
the bag,
the seed.

Slap
the flanks back.
Flatten

paps.
Make finny
scaled

and chill
the slack
and dimple

of the rump.
Pout
the mouth,

brow the eyes
and now
and now

eclipse
in these hips,
these loins

the moon,
the blood
flux.

It's done.
I turn,
I flab upward

blub-lipped,
hipless
and I am

sexless,
shed
of ecstasy,

a pale
swimmer,
sequin-skinned,

pearling eggs
screamlessly
in seaweed.

It's what
I set my heart on.
Yet

ruddering
and muscling
in the sunless tons

of new freedoms,
still
I feel

a chill pull,
a brightening,
a light, a light,

and how
in my loomy cold,
my greens,

still
she moons
in me.

- Eavan Boland

Copyright 1982 by Eavan Boland
from An Origin Like Water: Collected Poems 1967-1987 by Eavan Boland. Used by permission of W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.