Emily's Images

1987

To Jayn Rosenfeld

7 minutes

Flute and piano

Jayn Rosenfeld

September 15, 1987, Latin-American Foundation for Contemporary Music, University of Puerto Rico. Jayne Rosenfeld, flute and Evelyn Crochet, piano

“The Sky’s the Limit,” Crystal Records, Digital CD 317, Leone Buyse, flute and Martin Amlin, piano.  "Legacy of the American Woman Composer," 4Tay Records, CD4018, Laurel Ann Mauser, flute and Joanne Pearce Martin, piano.  Also available on demo CD

1. A Spider sewed at Night
2. A Clock stopped–Not the Mantel’s
3. Exultation is the going
4. The Robin is a Gabriel
5. After great pain, a formal feeling comes
6. The Leaves like Women interchange
7. A Day! Help! Help! Another Day!

Emily’s Images was inspired by reading through an index of first lines of poems by Emily Dickinson. Each short movement is based on the first line of a poem. Fine explains that the musical form is a series of free variations with no overtly stated theme; the musical ideas themselves are the subject of the variation processes. Many subtle and surprising connections exist among the movements. As an example, the notes of “The Robin is a Gabriel” (the lone movement for solo flute) are a rhythmically transposed version of “A Spider sewed at Night” beginning in the second bar. The canon between piano and flute in “The Leaves like Women interchange” employs those same notes in yet another rhythmic and octave transposition.

–notes for “The Sky’s the Limit”

“Emily’s Images…are seven brief suggestions of Emily Dickinson’s poetry. As pleasant concert music, they do not require the listener to be familiar with the literature. The flute and piano play at and with one another in snatches of canon and octave exchanges….The piece offers college-level players a most programmable twentieth century work.”

–Betty-Ann Lynerd, Women of Note Quarterly, February 1997

A Spider sewed at Night

Exultation is the going