Hi, my name is Robbie LaBanca
and I'm the Managing Director of Inversion Ensemble
and the composer of the next piece
you're about to hear entitled, "Aquatic Suite."
This piece is divided into three movements
and each movement is inspired by the text of a female poet:
Marjorie Meeker, Ursula K. LeGuin, and Valerie Martínez.
Ii wanted to challenge myself as a composer
to write instrumental music based on text
without utilizing the actual text itself in the music.
I really love these poems because I think they speak to
the simplistic and yet profound nature of
the element of water and how it can nourish and cleanse
and also is mysterious in ways that we don't understand,
So please enjoy "Aquatic Suite" as performed by
flutist Adrienne Inglis, cellist Amy Norris, and pianist Joseph Choi.
"Certainly Oceans" by Marjorie Meeker
Copyright 1927
First appeared in Poetry Magazine November 1927
Certainly oceans proud with their manifold rhythms
of rainy silver or sullen gold,
hold fire celestial variously glowing,
All heaven and hues forever ebbing and
flowing
with their praised prismatic tides:
yet even a brook has a heart of sky,
should any stop to look—
Should any stop to look, a brook may keep
Colors of time, of lovers' tears, of sleep.
To the rain by Ursula K. LeGuin, used by
permission of Curtis Brown Ltd.
Copyright 2018 First appeared in "So Far
So Good,"
poems 2014-2018,  published by Copper
Canyon Press in 2018
All rights reserved.
Mother rain, manifold, measureless,
falling on fallow, on field and forest,
on house-roof, low hovel, high tower
downwelling waters all-washing, wider
than cities, softer than sisterhood, vaster
than countrysides, calming, recalling
return to us, teaching our troubled
souls and your ceaseless descent
to fall, to be fellow, to feel to the root,
to sink in, to heal, to sweeten the sea.
"Bowl" by Valerie Martínez from "World to World"
published by University of Arizona Press
Used by permission of the author.
Copyright 2004 by Valerie Martínez
All rights reserved.
Turn it over
and look into the sphere of heaven
the tracery is lucent,
light seeping
through to write,
white-ink your face, upturned.
Swing it below and it's a cradle of blue
water,
the sea, a womb.
A mixing bowl for Babylonian gods.
Here, they whirl up the cosmos.
Pick it up and your hands form a pedestal,
and all who drink contain the arcs
of a body in the universe—
and between them,
no imaginable tear or distance.
