UC San Diego

Poems of sheer nothingness is an original song cycle for soprano and chamber ensemble that sets the poetic introductions of five early troubadours in their original Occitan. Written between the 12th and 15th centuries in southern France, these five introductions originally served as preambles (themselves sung) to a much longer song. In Poems of sheer nothingness the subsequent love songs are done away with, leaving their introductions in isolation to provide commentary on poetry, songwriting, and the relationship between words and music.

The textual introduction describes some of the compositional techniques found within the song cycle, tracing their origins in the phenomenological philosophy of Franz Brantano, Edmund Husserl, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Martin Heidegger. These include the concepts of sonic phenomena, sonic objects, eidetic variation, and the auditory scene. Text setting and the composer's original translation and transliteration of the five Occitan texts are also discussed. Musical examples accompany the text throughout, which is followed by a complete score of the five songs.