My Thoughts Fly In At Your Window

My Thoughts Fly In At Your Window (2020), is a chamber work in two movements inspired by the final line in Sara Teasdale’s poem At Night, which reads ‘my thoughts fly in at your window, a flock of wild birds.’ Each movement is titled after the two halves of the sentence so that the first movement leads into the second as if thoughts are expressed within one and turned into and released as birds in the other. The structure of the central melodic line in ‘My thoughts fly in at your window..’ acts as an unspoken vocalization of the poem, which breaks into a flurry of motivic fragments to emulate the building up and accumulation of swirling thoughts at the conclusion of the passage. These thoughts are then freed in the second movement scored for strings ‘..as a flock of wild birds’; the harmonic foundation of the central melodic line in the first movement returns as delicate figures to create a fragile sound-world emulating thoughts expressed with the liberty of wild, untethered birds.

© Grace-Evangeline Mason, 2020