Bobby Ge - Pupil of Light, for soprano, ensemble, and electronics (Khemia Ensemble) [Score Follow]

Completed April 1, 2023 Premiered April 19, 2024 by Khemia Ensemble in Music for a Great Space, Greensboro, North Carolina Commissioned by Khemia Ensemble I have been an admirer of Karen An-Hwei Lee’s sumptuous poetry for years now. Her profound yet transparent writings are often surprisingly prosaic, blending technical buzzwords and theological jargon together with colloquial, personal observations of the world around her. Though her works pose elemental questions about God and existence, the writing never feels pompous: her posture is always one of quiet curiosity and humility. Selecting a text of hers to set, however, proved quite a challenge. The same features of her poetry that so appealed to me - its unwieldy vocabulary, its prose-like nature, its ambiguity - also made it decidedly tricky to conceive of as song. I was grateful, then, to discover Say If Not a Moon, an unexpectedly lyrical yet no less characteristic piece of hers. The poem paints a familiar scene of a full moon