Cicada song

On a summer day ,beneath a tree in my neighborhood, I was surrounded by the ear splitting chorus of cicadas, and I tried to imitate their cries. "Voice of the Cicadas" was composed in that very summer. I undertook to set the famous haiku by Edo period master Matsuo Bashō, "Shizukasa ya / iwa ni shimiiru / semi no koe" ("The stillness- / the cicadas' cry / seeping into the rocks"), as a song. The tremolo that opens the piece is based on the cicada calls I discerned that day.

French composer Olivier Messiaen is renowned for his Catalogue d'oiseaux, in which he transcribed birdsong as musical material but this work can be thought of as my own cicada catalogue (even though cicadas produce almost noise level intensity, they tremble with life).

In the brief silences between the cicadas' cries, we glimpse the breath of the planet itself. The extreme quiet between their calls allows us a moment's contact with the living pulse of this Earth.

Notes / background:
Bashō's famous haiku "Shizukasa ya ...semi no koe" was composed on July 13, 1689 (old calendar: May 27, Genroku 2) at Risshaku-ji ("Yamadera") in Yamagata-and scholars debate whether it referred to nī nī-zemi (Niinii cicadas), because Aburazemi wouldn't yet have emerged at that time of year
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Messiaen's Catalogue d'oiseaux is a cycle of 13 piano pieces composed between October 1956 and September 1958, transcribing the songs of 77 birds as musical themes and evoking their habitats in sound
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