Length: 5:40

Instrumentation: high voice (B3 to Bb5), piano

Year: 2024

Poetry by Leela Srinivasan

Awarded First Place Prize in Sparks and Wiry Cries’
2024 Chicago SongSlam, hosted by Fourth Coast Ensemble

About the work:

The text for i am is assembled from the journals of my longtime collaborator, Leela Srinivasan. She sent several entries about growing into and solidifying her own sense of self identity, and gave me her blessing to assemble them into a singular text for a new song. The connecting thread of the lines I selected was a theme of contradictions: we can feel simultaneously huge and small; confident and unsure; beautiful and terrible.

Musically, I simply aimed to accentuate the vivid imagery of the text. At times I chose delicately interwoven tapestries of musical lines, and other times it becomes expansive and sweeping. The vocalist, accordingly, is asked to demonstrate a range of vocal restraint, from quietly introspective to unabashedly free and powerful.

Text:

What was I built for?
What am I made of?

I don’t feel like the mountain
as much as I do the air around it,
the sky pouring in the space between.

I see myself in everything,
the snowflakes on my coat,
the ebb and flow of the season,

I am the sickness
that rises up like the tide,

I am the sun
setting on the snowy peaks,
I am the sun—

All the beautiful and terrible selves
I hold in my hands,
I carry in my lungs.

Leela Srinivasan