The Desired Hour for Voice, Piano & Horn

“The Desired Hour” (2014)

for Tenor, Horn, and Piano

Music by Huei-Yuan Pan

The creative spark for “The Desired Hour” began with a poem by my incredibly talented writer friend, Michelle Brittan. It was my introduction to a style of writing called poetry of witness, which offers a writer’s historical and cultural testimony in poetic form. Michelle had written the poem mid-flight, later explaining to me how she was moved by the story currently in the news about the missing Malaysian Airlines Flight 370. In her words:

“I’m hoping it speaks to the larger idea of empathy and loss, even as it takes issue with whether it’s possible to achieve such empathy at such a safe distance, as well as mortality being an equalizer of differences. Of course the topic at the surface is timely and there may be other things that could develop over the ensuing days and weeks, potentially making the poem dated by what it doesn’t know yet. And yet I feel a strange urgency because of that timeliness, and so I thought I’d share in the event this is something you might like to set to music.”

Included in this Digital Download: Score, Solo Vocal, Piano and Horn and reference recording