Composer: Trevor Bača.
Forces: cello.
Duration: 25 minutes.
Page 9 of Huitzil (2014) for cello.
Program note
The following inscription, written by the composer, appears at the head of the score:
She says:
“Do not look in his eye but whisper instead to his ear. His giant round ear let to droop from the weight of obsidian curves of the lobe. He will ask you to pierce the bend of his tongue with the needle-sharp point of your beak. But pierce you must not. You must carry to him my record of dreams and the future they describe as I sleep. You must speak silently to him the words of our wedding and the wishes of birds that they carry with them as their freight. He will remember our dreaming-together and the heaviness we shared in our sleep. Then he will close his eyes. And when he does you must brush with your wings the bend of his ear and leave there like sand the husks of my words which he in his sleep will know but not hear. Then in the daylight he will carry with him our record of dreams and the future they describe as I sleep.”
Hummingbird carries her words like salt on his wings and takes to the sky in his flight.
The piece is about interwoven dreams and the ways that the act of dreaming overcomes the content of the dreams we forget and also the ones we remember.
First performances
World premiere given by Alan Toda-Ambaras on 22 November 2015 at Cabot House on the campus of Harvard University.