Around the Idea of You, by Jonathan Howard Katz

Description

AROUND THE IDEA OF YOU (2020) by Jonathan Howard Katz

for soprano and cello

13 pages (score)

Vocal range: Bb3 – A5 (optional C6)

9 in. x 12 in. bound score

Program note:

In 2019, about seven years after completing my previous song cycle, I found myself with strong desire to return to the genre. I began to connect with more singers and explore the work of living poets, and I soon had several projects in the works. After a chance encounter with one of Andrea Cohen’s poems on social media, I read more and more of her work and soon had a long list of her poems that I wanted to set to music. Thankfully, she was charitable towards the idea and helped connect me with her publishers. In the spring of 2020, as part of a flurry of composition during the initial pandemic shutdown, I set ten of Andrea’s poems in two song cycles, one with piano, and this one with cello. The piano cycle (As If Saying Goodbye) was premiered later that year, but the pandemic disrupted the plans for the other, eventually making it impossible to premiere with the originally intended performers and venue. I kept it in the back of my mind as other projects came and went, and it finally received its premiere on December 13, 2025, at Tenri Cultural Institute in New York City, with soprano Sharon Harms and cellist Kirsten Jermé. Coincidentally, Sharon had previously premiered a different work I’d since written (To Take You There), also with cello, and also setting Andrea Cohen’s poetry, though in that case it was a single, larger-scale poem.

This work is available for retail purchase from Theodore Front Musical Literature.
This work is available for institutional purchase from Harrassowitz (OttoEditions) and Theodore Front Musical Literature.
PDF score coming soon!

ISMN 979-0-800356-18-6