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pity this busy monster, manukind

from Music for Hollow Voices by Blake DeGraw

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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

credits

from Music for Hollow Voices, released April 27, 2023

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Blake DeGraw Seattle, Washington

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