Three God(Love) Songs

As I've said before one of my favorite poets of all-time is the brilliant e.e. cummings. I consider him one of the most romantic writers of the 20th century. Although his experimentation with syntax, grammar, punctuation and even letter placement can render some of his work nigh incomprehensible, from a purely emotional standpoint his poetry is bursting with deep insights into a soul infatuated with love and God. I took 3 of my favorite poems: "love is the every only God", "i thank you God for most this amazing" and "i have found what you are like" and made a small song cycle out of them. I really like the texts because they deal with love and faith, and how the two intertwine. Love and faith are very similar concepts...they both involve putting a tremendous amount of trust in something or someone outside of you. Love takes faith and faith takes love. I accompanied the voice with harp, because I wanted there to be plenty of sustain and a simple beauty to the piece. Of course it can be played on piano, but I like the quality that orchestral harp gives. Cummings' text has a definite lyrical quality, and I believe he selected words as much for their sound as their meanings often. This allows for a lot of tone color in the accompaniment. I used a lot of small ideas pieced together to bring the written words to life. I tried to piece them all together harmonically using similar motives and harmonic language. I try to use the fullest comfortable range of the voice in a lot of different colors to convey what I believe the texts to mean...