Postponeless Creature

Set for three female voices and chamber ensemble, Postponeless Creature is the third in a collection of five poems that frame As Sudden Shut, a 75-minute multimedia chamber opera created in collaboration with visual artists and directors the Quay Brothers and writer Steve Weiner. Through a weaving of text and music with stop-motion animation, choreography and carefully constructed lighting and stagecraft, As Sudden Shut will be a multi-sensory path into the wildly explosive imagination of Emily Dickinson. This incredibly eerie poem is set sparsely to create space for the other visual and staging elements to be explored.

It’s coming — the postponeless Creature —
It gains the Block — and now — it gains the Door —
Chooses its latch, from all the other fastenings —
Enters — with a “You know Me — Sir”?

Simple Salute — and certain Recognition —
Bold — were it Enemy — Brief — were it friend —
Dresses each House in Crape, and Icicle —
And carries one — out of it — to God —

Anna Clyne, 2015

"The title refers to death, and Clyne’s setting of Dickinson’s stanzas skillfully exploits timbral extremes to unsettling effect. The women chant the Dickinson text in a high tessitura, while the harpsichord lends an ars antique quality, the music segueing into a danse macabre, creepy and unsettling in its waltz-like undulations. Yet the palette and music are subtly varied by Clyne over the 12-minute duration, slowing to a hushed, haunting coda for bass, harp and vibraphone.” —Chicago Classical Review