---

Programme Note

i. Had I not seen the sun
ii. I had no time to hate

The two short Emily Dickinson settings were commissioned by the American choir Conspirare and its director Craig Hella Johnson for their recording Threshold of Night. They were intended to frame the programme rather like a compositional 'inhalation' and 'exhalation', a crescendo and decrescendo, or a prelude and postlude. Densely textured, the music aims to hint at the myriad readings Dickinson's surface-simple poetry yields in its many readers. Each setting uses a solo soprano and tenor, their voices referencing the polarities inherent in each poem ('sun' and 'shade'; 'love' and 'hate').

Tarik O'Regan 2008