A five-minute piece on a 2020 poem about the climate change crisis ("Remix with a Few Lines from Keats”) by Danielle Cadena Deulen. Premiere was a program (with online notes) called "Songs of Earth."

Composer's notes: Deulen beautifully captures the wakeful restlessness and the fitful dreaming of living in a world in peril. I wanted to capture this in the music by using stark harmonies and occasional drones slipped in under quick phrases. These quick phrases are juxtaposed with the occasional “pastoral” scene with music that is more melismatic and melodic. Deulen "remixes" her own words with a few lines from Keats’s "Ode To A Nightingale." We’re in a dream state and a living nightmare all at once. The language, at some points stark and blunt, “no bird singing [ ] nothing to ode” prompted musical settings that are stark and blunt where singers are instructed to sing "Without Expression," "neither loud nor soft" and at times sensual as in “sharp scent of pine, wet soil, beast musk, rain” where I was prompted to draw out a word and/or musical line.

There are bracketed spaces throughout the poem, sometimes breaking up thoughts and phrases. For most of these, I chose silences of varying durations. It was my intention to cause discomfort. Often, the musical phrases feel cut short by silence. The idea is that this planet, teeming with life that is being cut short, is almost too much to fathom, but is also too close and too real to ignore. So, do we wake or sleep?