WHERE WILL I GO?

SATB choir and piano

My senior year of high school, I wanted to enter a piece into PMEA's composition contest, like I had done the previous year. And since it was my senior year, I figured that a piece about leaving and moving on would be fitting, albeit a little sappy. After a brief bit of searching, I found a poem called "Leaving" by New York poet and children's author, Amy Ludwig VanDerwater. While it wasn't the optimistic poem I had originally been searching for, the poem really stood out to me, and I knew that it had to be the one that I would use. Coincidentally, the poem's sonnet structure meant that it happened to fit my tentative melodic idea, note-for-note, syllable-for-syllable.

I started work on the vocal parts of the piece, and eventually I realized that I could combine this piece with a a small 8 measure piano line I had written months ago without any particular usage in mind. Furthermore, I realized that this piano theme could function as "grandma's song," a significant part of the story. This motif was then woven throughout the piece, as this song courses through her mind, reminding her of home.

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Once the piece was done, my choir director was gracious enough to take time out of class so we could learn and record it, and my music theory teacher helped with recording it. It was sent off to PMEA, and a few months later, I learned that the piece was a winner of the high school division. (This news was accompanied with a lot of excited screaming on my part.) The director of the group slated to perform it reached out to me to find out more about the piece, and whilst we were working together, he recommended the piece to Santa Barbara Music Publishing, where it is now published.

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I would like to thank the poet, Amy Ludwig VanDerwater, for being so excellent to work with, my music theory teacher, Jon Derby, for answering all my compositional questions, my choir director, Todd Kuczawa, for allowing the choir to learn and perform it under my own direction, and Matthew Erpelding, for bring the piece to life with his direction and for getting me in contact with a publishing company.

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ERRATA: The tempo marking went missing in the published octavo—the correct tempo marking is "Gently", and the quarter note equals 72.