Red Delicious

For Soprano and Piano

Written: 2025
Duration: ca. 3'
Instrumentation: soprano and piano
Written for The Century Association
World Premiere: The Century Association, Eine kleine Hausmusik concert, Susanna Phillips, soprano, TBA, piano, New York, NY, April 23, 2025

Program Note

Red Delicious for soprano and piano uses the poem "Red Delicious" by Jerome Ellison Murphy as the text for the lyrics. As Jerome writes: “Our adult guardians are the first deities we encounter. There’s an uncanniness to their environmental agency, and to their skills that seem, in early life, beyond our own capacity. Here, as in the poem ‘Our Mothers’ Hands,’ I write about refractions of identity visible in a simple physical act, peeling an apple with hypnotic precision, which occurs somewhere along a spectrum of creative and destructive impulse. Witnessing the mother both making and unmaking, the child suddenly questions their own centrality. It turns out motherhood is only one aspect of this creative self—and how nurturing, how safe, is any artist, at heart?”

  • Red Delicious

    I used to eat
                   her keen sight
                         and its laser
                                serrations
                    surgical rotations
                                undressing
                              bone-white
                       in clockwise
                      countdown
                       around a
                prenatal core
                           its cyanide
                                     unborn
                              this unsung
                           artist carving 
                            her curving
                           relief as if
                  by a craving
                of curvature
                     itself for
                conclusion:
                           or else
                                of some
                                    rondure
                                       so sheer                  
                                     as to molt
                                        its skin
                                    of matter
                               turn after
                                 turn on
                       the unseen                             
                   potter’s lathe
                   of unmaking:
                    thumb-spun
                     by a suddenly
                           unknowable Eve
                               who might soon
                                              no longer
                                                deign to
                                               receive
                                        the name
                                      Mother

    Copyright © 2022 by Jerome Ellison Murphy. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on January 7, 2022, by the Academy of American Poets, reprinted with permission from Jerome Ellison Murphy.