In a station of the metro / Ezra Pound

The apparition of these faces in the crowd ;
Petals on a wet, black bough.

Program Notes:
Staying true to the work’s reputation as a quintessential Imagist poem, I chose to musically explore the literary attempt to subvert the ongoing temporal flow, to present the observations noted by Pound at a Paris metro station as a series of moments, frozen in time. Parsing the text, a series of clear, isolated objects emerge – their slight musicalized variations allow different facets of each moment to materialize. At other times, these objects are broken into their components, like white light passed through a prism. The lack of clear signification in the original text is preserved, as the work is neither about a metro station, a crowd, or flower petals. Rather, the emphasis is on the experiential phenomena itself, its wide range of colours, shades and tints.