Come On All You Ghosts

PROGRAM NOTE

Come On All You Ghosts comprises three song settings, for voice and string quartet, of poems written by the beguiling San Francisco-based poet Matthew Zapruder from the eponymously titled collection, and seeks to find a musical equivalent of Zapruder’s fascinating diction. In each of the poems, Zapruder seems to me preoccupied with marrying the mundanity of contemporary life to spiritual and philosophical concerns.

In the first poem, “The Prelude,” Zapruder turns on a dime from meditations on the qualities of Diet Coke to the existential loneliness of Samuel Coleridge. The epistolary “Letter to a Lover” begins with an homage to the opening bars of the exquisite slow movement of Thomas Adès’ string quartet Arcadiana, but develops into something of a pop ballad, albeit one accompanied by string quartet only. The last song is the jaunty “April Snow,” depicting a scene of a snowed-in airport terminal; its language is simultaneously naturalistic and absurd, psychologically grounded and yet surreal.

The songs, like the poems, live in a kind of ecstatic purgatory between popular and classical idioms, and it’s my hope that I’ve honored Zapruder’s simultaneous commitment to irreverent and spiritual concerns in my setting of his work.

— Gabriel Kahane, 2011

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