Joyce Sutphen's poem, "From Out the Cave" comes from her collection of poems called "Carrying Water to the Field." What strikes me about her poetry is the sense of modesty and humility which she brings to her work, and how immediately relatable her poetry is. In this particular poem, it is the intense internal life and transformative experience of coming from a grim place, “being at war with yourself” to being awaken again and remembering the wonderful feeling of being joyous, “the last thing you remember doing with your whole heart.”

Following the poem, in my setting, I wanted to create a texture that is rich, lush, and evocative, but also a texture that is nuanced and expressive, paying special attention to the complex web of images presented in the poem. So, right in the beginning, the opening arpeggio in the piano, a minor chord rolled up sets the tone. The arpeggiated figures appear prominently throughout the song turning finally into harp-like arpeggios in the high register accompanying the final seven lines of the poem, starting with the words “that passionate kiss the brilliant drop of love.” The word “kiss” is set to the highest note of the song, the high B Flat. The song then, gradually subsides in intensity, going down in register as it draws to an end.

From Out the Cave

When you have been
at war with yourself
for so many years that
you have forgotten why,
when you have been driving
for hours and only
gradually begin to realize
that you have lost the way,
when you have cut
hastily into the fabric,
when you have signed
papers in distraction,
when it has been centuries
since you watched the sun set
or the rain fall, and the clouds,
drifting overhead, pass as flat
as anything on a postcard;
when, in the midst of these
everyday nightmares, you
understand that you could
wake up,
you could turn
and go back
to the last thing you
remember doing
with your whole heart:
that passionate kiss,
the brilliant drop of love
rolling along the tongue of a green leaf,
then you wake,
you stumble from your cave,
blinking in the sun,
naming every shadow
as it slips.

-Joyce Sutphen
used with permission by the author 

From Out the Cave was composed and premiered as part of the 2021 Source Song Festival. It was written for and premiered by Sabreena Cherrington, soprano and Maggie Hinchliffe, pianist, and distributed via online broadcast on August 2, 2021.

Helena Michelson is a composer based in the San Francisco-Bay Area. She completed her undergraduate studies in Music at the University of California, Berkeley and holds a doctorate in composition and theory from the University of California, Davis. Helena Michelson studied piano with Mack McCray at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music and, in masterlasses, with Richard Goode and Awadagin Pratt. She has studied composition, among others, with Olly Wilson, Cindy Cox, Jeffrey Miller, Pablo Ortiz, and, in masterclasses, with Louis Andriessen, Martin Bresnick, Mario Davidovsky, Eric Chasalow, Philippe Leroux, Bernard Rands, Judith Shatin, and Joel Hoffman.

She has been a fellow at numerous festivals including Composers Conference at Wellesley College, MusicX, June in Buffalo, and Domaine Forget in Québec. In addition, she has been a participating composer in Antico Moderno Ensemble's and the 2017 International Trombone Festival's (University of Redlands) Composers Workshops, the 2018 Opera From Scratch program (Halifax, Canada), a participating composer at the Bayou 2019 in Monroe, LA, the 2020 and 2021 Music by Women Festival in Columbus, Mississippi, the 2020 and 2021 N.E.O. Voice Festival in Los Angeles, and the Really Spicy Opera Arial Institute, Mezzo Soprano edition (2020) and Libretto Workshop (2021). Named one of the finalists in the 2017 HGOco Song of Houston Composer Call, her recent awards include grants from the American Composers Forum and Composer Assistance Program from New Music USA.

Further information is available at www.helenamichelson.com

Joyce Sutphen grew up on a farm in Stearns County, Minnesota. She is a professor emeritus of English at Gustavus Adolphus College and is Minnesota’s poet laureate.

She is the author of seven poetry collections, including Straight Out of View, Coming Back to the Body, and Naming the Stars, and is a coeditor of To Sing Along the Way: Minnesota Women Poets from Pre-Territorial Days to the Present.

Joyce Sutphen serves as the first Poet-In-Residence at Source Song Festival for our 2021 Festival.