Museum Pieces (2012)

Scored for female voice, alto saxophone or clarinet, and string quartet. These youth-friendly songs grew out of the larger initiative to celebrate the 30th anniversary of the Emrys Foundation, a support group launched in 1982 by writers, for writers, in Greenville, South Carolina. Helen Dupré Moseley (1887-1984) had earned a Masters' degree in History and had been a mother, widow, insurance businesswoman, and postmaster when, without training of any sort, she took up painting at the age of 60. Her style shows some influence from Salvador Dali, Henri Matisse and Hieronymus Bosch, but ultimately her whimsical and largely untitled works are the products of her fertile and uninhibited imagination. Moseley's family made a generous donation of a large number of her works to the Greenville County (SC) Museum of Art in 2000. In the summer of 2012 sixteen Emrys poets were invited to compose brief poems on selected works of Moseley's from the GCMA collection. These songs set six of those poems; as the paintings in question are untitled, the song titles are my own, derived from the poetry. In addition to the score and parts, a CD for projection of the images is provided.

For more detail, go to the vocal music section here. A live performance in which the paintings serve as a backdrop can be viewed here.  $40 for score, parts, demo, images of paintings for projection; order here.