"Who has seen the wind?" [Kevin Puts]

"Who has seen the wind?" [Kevin Puts]

First line of lyrics: Who has seen the wind?

Part of: "To Touch the Sky"

Puts, Kevin Matthew; music (American, born 1972)

Rossetti, Christina Georgina; text (English, 1830-1894)

2012 [publication]

Aperto Press

genre: song|song cycle

chorus: mixed chorus

instrumentation: a cappella

initial sharps/flats: five flats

initial time signature: 3/4

origin: United States

male composer

English

Rossetti poem(s): "'Who has seen the wind?'"

Place in the larger work: The seventh song of nine in the song cycle called "To Touch the Sky," which includes 1. "Annunciation" (Marie Howe); 2. "Unbreakable" (Mirabai); 3. "The Fruit of Silence" (Mother Teresa of Calcutta); 4. "Falling Snow" (Amy Lowell); 5. "At Castle Wood" (Emily Brontë); 6. "Epitaph" (Edna St. Vincent Millay); 7. "Who has seen the wind?" (Christina Rossetti); 8. "With my two arms" (Sappho); 9. "Most noble evergreen" (Hildegard of Bingen).

Composition history: "Though in 1999 or so, I wrote a short choral work for the 300th anniversary of Yale University, To Touch the Sky is my first mature attempt at writing for unaccompanied chorus. Its genesis began during a discussion with Craig Hella Johnson, the visionary conductor of the Austin, Texas-based chorus Conspirare, who mentioned the idea of the 'divine feminine' and its origins in the Magnificat as the potential basis for a large-scale choral work. While the religious concept of the biblical Mary is for me purely mythological, the following quotation from Mary’s Vineyard by Andrew Harvey nonetheless served as a point of departure: 'All the powers of all the world's Mothers — Tara, Durga, Kali, of the Tao — are in Mary. She has Tara's sublime protectiveness towards all creation; Durga's (the Fortress's) inaccessible, silent face; the grandeur and terribleness of Kali; the infinite awareness of balance and mystery of the Tao. […]In Mary, then, we have a complete image of the Divine Feminine, an image at once transcendent and immanent, other-worldly and this-worldly, mystical and practical.' With this multicultural interpretation in mind, I began searching for poems by women concerning 'spirituality' in the very broadest sense. My aunt, the poet Fleda Brown, is always a tremendous resource when it comes to finding texts, and her assistance here was no exception. She lead me first to Marie Howe’s beautiful 'Annunciation' which I decided could be sung by a soprano soloist over the first lines of the Magnificat, sung by the rest of the chorus at the very opening. I found poems by Emily Bronte, whose tragic 'At Castle Wood' lies at the center of what is a loosely based arch form. There are quotes from Sappho, Mother Teresa of Calcutta, poems by the 16th-century Indian poet-saint Mirabai, Amy Lowell, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Christina Georgina Rosetti, and the medieval composer, philosopher and mystic Hildegard of Bingen, in whose 'Most Noble Evergreen' I found great inspiration. | To Touch the Sky was commissioned by the Thelma Hunter Fund of the American Composers Forum and Conspirare" (Puts).

Tempo markings: quarter note = 96

Performance instructions: "Quick and light"

Performance history: "[To Touch the Sky] was premiered by Conspirare under the direction of Craig Hella Johnson on September 27, 2012."

Recordings: "To Touch the Sky: VII. Who has seen the wind?" Kevin Puts. Performance by Conspirare, Craig Hella Johnson, conductor. Harmonia Mundi, 2013. YouTube, uploaded by Conspirare - Topic, 28 March 2020, https://youtu.be/sgFK9PgWLQ8.

Format 1: musical score

5 pages (pp. 38-42); complete song cycle performance time 24 minutes

Other data reference(s): Puts, Kevin. "To Touch the Sky." Kevin Puts, http://www.kevinputs.com/program/to-touch-the-sky.html. Accessed 12 August 2021.
"Kevin Puts." Conspirare, https://conspirare.org/product/kevin-puts-cd/. Accessed 12 August 2021.

Cataloguer: Emily McConkey, University of Ottawa

musical score: University of Texas Libraries, The University of Texas at Austin, Austin

Record: CRM-whohasseen-puts

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