Program Note:

What I find most remarkable about Tracy K. Smith’s poetry is its ability to unassumingly blur the line between a profound contemplation of life’s biggest questions and a probing of the simpler experiences in ordinary life.  It is at once universal and highly personal, intangible and yet so familiar.  Written in 2011, Life on Mars confronts the “fundamental unknowables” of this “large and mysterious system we belong to,” while acknowledging that our usual answers - religion, science, art - all invariably fall short.  

Moments Sweep Past sets three poems from this collection without pause - “The Weather in Space,” “It & Co.,” and “Us & Co.” Despite their contrasting moods - from sprawling and pensive to whimsical and coy - these poems share the same broad contemplativeness of Life on Mars at large, meditating on our search for the answers to these great unknowables.

The music likewise aims to at once capture each poem’s individual character while drawing a single thread throughout, with shared motives, harmonies, and textures constantly evolving into new expressive contexts.  The reflective, resonant first poem gives way to a more active and playful second before arriving back at the original mood, now tinged with wistfulness and reverence. While the poetry leaves us with more questions than answers, it still manages to both challenge and nourish. I hope to have captured a little bit of that in this piece.