My publisher, Oxingale Music, just released the newly revised and renotated score for the first piece I ever wrote for myself to sing. Weeping for a dead love, for low female voice and percussion quartet, draws on Ukraine’s lamentation tradition, known as gholosinnia, to mourn the dissolution of a romantic relationship. I wrote it for myself and my own semi-folk singing style, not imagining that another singer would take on this rather peculiar work. But not only did another singer take it on, she was a classically trained singer, which I didn’t expect at all. Svitlana Melnyk, a mezzo-soprano who fled from Kharkiv at the start of russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, gave multiple performances of this work in Italy with the students of Istituto Superiore di Studi Musicali di Reggio Emilia in the summer of 2022, connecting to it in a way that was very special to me. She demonstrated that the piece works for a more classically sounding voice and that it is very emotionally relevant to the current moment. So I decided to make it available to others. The score is available for purchase here.
Here is my performance of the piece, premiered with So Percussion at Princeton University’s Sound Kitchen in the spring of 2015.
And here’s Svitlana Melnyk performing the work in Italy in the summer of 2023.
