Childhood Poems of Caitlyn Fox is a setting of six poems written by my niece between the ages of four and seven. Even before reading any of these six poems, I knew that I wanted to compose music to Caitlyn’s words. I wanted my music to absorb some of her exceptionally busy imagination and raw, uninhibited creativity. At the same time, I wanted to frame her relat- able and sometimes amusing expression of common childhood experiences.

 

Exemplifying Caitlyn’s prodigious imagination, her poem “Black Rider” solemnly tells one of her many legends of O’nelia, an exotic world that she had imagined and explored in detail years before writing “Black Rider”. The poem narrates Black Rider’s heroic deeds partly in English and partly in O’nelian. The feeling of half-blindness that comes from continually encountering a language on the brink of English intelligibility perfectly complements the poem’s pervasive black imagery.

 

Given the spontaneity of the poetry, I put aside my normal compulsions to instead compose the music freely, without a consistent syntax. Both tonal and serial ideas appear and disappear whimsically throughout the music along with less conventional designs. The third movement, “My Birthday Cake”, presents the music’s most prolonged commitment to a particular syntax, but even there the syntax is a hybrid. The vocal melody employs a classic twelve-tone row while the piano harmonizes it in functional tonality.

 

To further reflect the childhood freedom of the poems, the piano introduction imitates the joyful, vigorous fist-pounding style of piano playing that I have heard from many young children, us- ually just before an adult closed the keyboard lid. The piano introduction draws inspiration from an actual recording that I made of young relatives improvising on the piano.