Composer’s Note:

These settings are functionally tonal and highly chromatic. Texts are all from the poet’s early years–poems written in the 1950s, lyric poems of great technical skill and elegant use of language, end-of-line rhyme schemes, and classic pentamer scansion–very unlike Rich’s later works–yet well suited to the harmonic language of these settings. Titles of the respective movements in the score are from the first line of each of the respective three poems, to which the poet gave her own titles (printed on p. 2 of the score).