Program Notes:

Though the title of Ricki Rothchild’s poem is Lesson Learned in Quarantine with a Doomed Relationship, I’ve titled this composition Softly Broken as a way of highlighting what I see as the two main aspects of this text, the softness and the brokenness within. The composition also seeks to portray contrasts – steady versus disjunct, uniting versus separating, and struggling versus resolution.

Softly Broken was commissioned in the fall of 2021 by Kara Dugan for a project titled "In a New York Minute." In this project, five female composers were commissioned to set texts created by NYC poets. The project resulted in a collection of five one-minute pieces that aim to promote female voices while endeavoring to represent our collective experience of transitioning out of pandemic life.