The Endings of Things From A Distance by Matt Curlee performed by Michael Burritt

Program Notes (Matt Curlee)
Endings can be dramatic, but most are elusive. Remaining time slips like sand through fingers, too quickly to feel what is there to be felt, leaving only a fading, shrinking image. When Michael Burritt commissioned Endings, I asked musician and poet Wendy Eisenberg to write a meditation on this idea. Wendy’s words not only capture, but trigger a feeling of intangibility, seeming to glide past the horizon even as they are spoken. This poetry and the surrounding vocal textures are delivered by my old friend and collaborator Mandy Elliot, whose haunting and malleable voice constitutes the whole of the tape part, except for a bit of percussion played on the desk in my studio.

The Endings of Things, from a Distance can be purchased - marimba part, prerecord, and clicks - at www.mattcurlee.com.

Text
To look at the statistics and decide
whether article “an” is gendered,
To name one before another,
The armies of sleet looked at the icicles
like how dogs look in a mirror
hematopoietically , in millimeters. Does
a spoon, denied its place at the table,
hunch cave or vex? I look ­­
at the lay of the land and “hmm” to myself,
like two scientists in love, deciding
whether to get married, one to another,
knowing how so often it ends, questioning
the motivations, creating, periodically, a curse
that even scientists can believe in.
-Wendy Eisenberg