Once On Never Recur Over

once on never recur over is an exploration of slowly discovering a piece of music from its fragments. The music is comprised of a single vocal line that is sung only partly until the full line is heard in toward the middle of the work. This vocal line then begins diminishing again into fragments until the music ends. For the text, I worked with the constraint that the words would contain no letters with stems or dots above or below the character: the letters q,t,y,i,p,d,f,g,h,j,k,l, and b do not appear in the verses. However, these stemmed letters do appear when they are sung by the tenors and basses in quiet interjections. Most of the words come from a single day’s newspaper copy and were chosen to create a poem.