Your Name (2021)
Instrumentation: soprano and piano
Duration: 3'
Text: Joyce Sutphen
Premiere: Valeria Bibliowicz (mezzo-soprano) and Felipe Calle (piano) on August 4, 2021 (Virtual)
“Your Name” is featured on Tapestry of Voices, recorded by Bree Nichols (soprano) and Alexandr Starý (piano). Tapestry of Voices from Navona Records showcases the versatility and elegance of the human voice woven with grand orchestral statements, colorful choral arrangements, and intimate settings with piano.
“A short song called Your Name by Ryan Homsey uses the poetry of Joyce Sutphen and transforms it into a magical world.”
“Ryan Homsey’s “Your Name” blends the poetic singing of Nichols alongside Starý’s soft and agile key progressions.”
“Your Name” was composed as part of the Source Song Festival, led by composers Libby Larsen and David Evan Thomas, setting the poetry of Minnesota Poet Laureate (2011-2021) Joyce Sutphen from Carrying Water to the Field: New and Selected Poems.
8th Season of Source Song Festival composers, singers, and pianists.
Carrying Water to the Field: New and Selected Poems by Joyce Sutphen
Program Note
“Your Name” is a meditation on the loss of a loved one who is forgotten momentarily, but whose memory returns in a vision of the sky and the prairie. In her poem, Joyce Sutphen, Minnesota’s Poet Laureate, proclaims that the dead can communicate from “beyond the grave” through the images, sounds, and even silence, that permeate the landscape. The harmony is imbued with gentle, diffused dissonances that impart the poem’s tension between physical absence and the enduring quality of love. As a native Midwesterner from Superior, Wisconsin, I felt an immediate connection to Joyce’s poetry—and especially the sense of longing depicted in “Your Name.”
Joyce Sutphen and Ryan Homsey
