Instrumentation

Mezzo Soprano
Piano

Duration: 4m
Year of Composition: 2024

Perusal Score

Program Notes
(abridged)

Lie Still is dedicated to Anka Marinic, my great-grandmother. I called her Baka, which means grandmother in Croatian. In 2010, she suffered a stroke that confined her body to a wheelchair and required her to move to a care home. Despite her physical impairment, her mind remained as strong as ever, as did her persistence and sense of pride. Every day, for fourteen years, she needed the help of nurses to transfer her from the bed to her wheelchair. I remember our family talking about how she would be more comfortable if she would rest and lay down. Looking back on my memories of her, and the stories I’ve been told, it’s clear to me that she was never one to lie still.

Adelaide Crapsey was an American poet whose work I adore. She suffered from tuberculosis for the last decade or so of her life, and in her 􏰎nal years was admitted to a nursing home at Saranac Lake in New York, where she wrote To the Dead in the Graveyard Underneath My Window. She passed away in 1914 at the age of 36. The text of Lie Still is adapted from this poem.