ME AND MY SONG (2019)
for Bass-Baritone and Piano/Jazz Combo
An Evening-Length Song Cycle on the Poems of Langston Hughes
Duration: 25 minutes min.
Commission: Commissioned by Roland Burks, Bass-Baritone
Me and my Song is a song cycle of thirteen poems selected from The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes. These poems were selected for portraying important events of Hughes’s life and key subjects encountered in his poetry – growing up poor in the south, the Harlem renaissance, racism and political activism, success and disappointment, youth and old age, life and death. The music of Me and my Song will incorporate Jazz idioms and contemporary techniques with the traditional song-cycle structure. The ambition of this project is to shed Hughes’s poetry in a contemporary light.