I composed this little song in 2018 as a donated commission for a Princeton Pro Musica fundraising auction. The winning bidder was soprano Carol Johnston, for whom I had earlier written But What of That?, also available in this catalog. For her text, she chose the Yeats poem To a Squirrel at Kyle-Na-No. The vocal line spans from C4 to F-sharp5, and asks for clean lyrical singing over a scampering “squirrelly” accompaniment; the combination makes an engaging, slightly comic recital or audition piece.

The tempo marking is allegretto giocoso, and the conceit is simple: the piano is the squirrel and the soprano is the human coaxing it. Written in F major, a two-bar introduction sets an old-fashioned, faintly hokey tone, the two hands working in offset rhythms so the music twitches and darts the way a squirrel does. The soprano enters plainly with her invitation to play, then her line climbs as she pictures the gun she does not have, cresting on a high F-sharp at “dead,” a peak flanked by tritones.

A contrasting section follows: the piano turns legato as she explains that all she would really do is scratch the creature’s head, a phrase she repeats with growing intensity amid a few more biting tritones. On the final repetition she spins out a long melisma on “scratch,” after which piano trills mimic the scratching itself. She gives in, dolce, with “and let you go.” The opening piano material recaps in a brief coda, she sings the closing line once more over octaves in the piano, and the piece comes to rest on a quiet staccato punctuation mark.

For an additional fee and on request, I can transpose this song to suit any voice. The audio sample is from the opening of the work. Here is the full text:

* According to A Yeats Dictionary by Lester Conner, Kyle-na-no is one of the Seven Woods at Coole Park, Lady Gregory Augusta’s County Galway estate, which was an important meeting place for the Irish Literary Revival in the late 19th and early 20th century.