Here’s a nice video of Chris Cerrone’s I Will Learn To Love a Person, which I performed back in March with Mellissa Hughes, Christa van Alstine, and Ian Rosen­baum. All micro­tones absolutely intentional.

I also wrote a little “editor’s note” about the piece, to preface its imminent publication: 

I’ve been immersed in Christo­pher Cerrone’s music for several years—performing, discussing, observ­ing the process, and occa­sion­ally offering advice—and I’ve come to think of it all as “vocal music”, even in its purely instru­men­tal moments. In his Invis­i­ble Overture, one of the earliest pieces I heard, an arching woodwind melody emerges from violent string gestures, a premo­ni­tion of the elegiac opera to follow (Invis­i­ble Cities). It’s a recur­ring setup in his music: relent­less devel­op­ment of a single musical point, until it is almost forced to become a song.

Chris’s I Will Learn to Love a Person is a piece about relationships—personal, romantic, harmonic, and timbral. Like all of his music, it obses­sively controls its limited musical mate­ri­als in service of big emotional catharses.

There are two contrast­ing “types” of song in I Will Learn to Love a Person. The first, third, and fifth songs emerge from extem­po­ra­ne­ous-sounding clouds of harmonies and words: call it text message recita­tive. The second and fourth songs are bright and motoric, with a candid humor that coun­ter­acts the extreme vulner­a­bil­ity of the slow move­ments. The five songs are master­fully sequenced in a harmonic palin­drome, with short inter­ludes of repeated E’s acting as pivot points. Harmonic changes are few, and withheld until they feel revelatory. 

The rela­tion­ship of text and music is no less painstak­ing. It’s a rare case in which a musical setting is more than the sum of its parts: Tao Lin’s poems, which can be diffi­cult to pin down on the page (are they sincere, or a bit glib?) and the music, so diaphanous at times it seems in danger of evaporating—powerfully concen­trate each other in combi­na­tion. Both elements sound simpler than they actually are. The pianist offhand­edly touches some notes, outlin­ing a harmony, over which the singer declaims what could be a series of self-pitying text messages: 

seen from a great enough distance i cannot be seen
 i feel this as an extremely distinct sensa­tion
 of feeling like shit

I Will Learn… requires a wide-ranging and nuanced dramatic perfor­mance in order to work correctly; perhaps more than a song cycle, it should be thought of as a self-analyt­i­cal monodrama. Its protag­o­nist is a preco­cious observer of the world and other people, but also immature and wildly heart­bro­ken; the process of the piece is the discov­ery that there is, of course, no set of rules that govern human relationships.