Lucky to Be Me (2022)

Instrumentation: solo soprano, piano

Performance time: ~4:45

About the piece

I wrote this piece as a composer part of the Source Song Festival in 2022! This festival was the first one I had ever gotten into as a composer, and I was initially very intimidated along with my uncontainable excitement. This was also the first time I had worked with a contemporary poem this long, and it was a great learning experience. I enjoyed the process greatly.

(Fun fact: I wrote most of the piece on my morning and evening Caltrain trips to and from my internship in the summer of 2022! Multitasking at its finest.)

Normally I'm not one to gravitate toward poems about attraction and love for my own compositions, but this one I found to be really compelling, as it is both passionate and intimate in its own way. The poem reminisces on a memory of a past romantic experience that the poet shared with someone at a bar, but the relationship did not carry on after that moment. However, she revisits the bar, sees this person again, and the memory floods back.

The accompaniment is mostly an ostinato that represents both the hustle and bustle of the bar and the past experience as a whole, which the singer becomes involved with in various ways: both singing in unison with it, singing above it, and singing without it, representing where she is, what she is describing, and how she feels.