Triptych to an Innocent Love

Listen to the work here!
 
Triptych to an Innocent Love is a cycle of three short movements for solo alto and piano, with text by author Chanel Pulido. She is a personal friend of mine, and I reached out to her as I was learning more about the idioms and performance conventions of writing for the voice and setting text, and was interested in using some poetry of hers as the basis for such a work for voice and piano, if she had any writings that she thought would work well for this. The three short poems set here, which were originally created as a trio for a competition, resulted in the creation of this piece.
 
The movements are:
I. Drowning in Love: A moderate ballad with constantly chromatically shifting harmonies and wave-like triplet figures in the piano, accompanying the vocalist describing the feeling of drowning in all of the affection that they feel for their beloved.
II. Tea Leaves: A slow and somewhat morbid waltz with chiming tones in different registers, where the vocalist describes falling apart like tea leaves for their beloved in a cathartic but perhaps somewhat self-destructive way.
III. Love at First Remembrance: Vibrant and soaring music accompanies the description of the vocalist having been with their beloved in a past life, and thus having loved them far longer than they have known them, and the subsequent hope that they will love each other after they pass into the next life.