about
For four voices.
An adaptation of the E.E. Cummings poem "pity this busy monster, manunkind".
I admittedly am not much of a poetry buff, nor was I even familiar with Cummings when I wrote this, outside of the fact that John Cage was into him. But I wanted to take a stab at setting poetry to music, which I had never done before, and this poem's written structure immediately spoke to me.
It wasn't until a vocal quartet rehearsed the song that it was pointed out to me that the word isn't "man-U-kind" (which my score called for at the time, and as I sung in this demo) but "man-UN-kind"; I had simply read the text wrong.
The score was subsequently changed, but frankly, I like my version of the word better. I just figured it was a marriage of "mankind" and "manufacture", which to me makes much more sense, given the poem's subject matter. Not to throw shade at this obvious master, but "manunkind" just seems, I dunno, way too on the nose.
Anyway, that's my justification and I'm sticking to it.
lyrics
pity this busy monster, manunkind,
not. Progress is a comfortable disease:
your victim (death and life safely beyond)
plays with the bigness of his littleness
--- electrons deify one razorblade
into a mountainrange; lenses extend
unwish through curving wherewhen till unwish
returns on its unself.
A world of made
is not a world of born --- pity poor flesh
and trees, poor stars and stones, but never this
fine specimen of hypermagical
ultraomnipotence. We doctors know
a hopeless case if---
[omitted from the song with artistic liberty]
listen: there's a hell
of a good universe next door; let's go
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