Dry Veins for grand piano and soprano voice (2012, AMH) FULL SCORE

Composer: Alannah Marie Halay (2013)

Words: John Darley

grand piano and solo soprano voice

"The most forceful one for me was Dry Veins, which begins and ends with spoken words. The poem, by John Darley, is scattered across two pages, its typography well matched by Alannah Halay’s startling music. [...]. The dramatic pauses and long-fading resonances were most effective." - bachtrack review

"The narrative is not gender-specific; it tells the story of a stonecutter who falls in love with ‘their’ own statue. The stone cutter’s longing desire to be at one with their creation is fulfilled when they gradually turn to stone and eventually disintegrate into dust. Dry Veins explores idealism versus reality within the creative process. Steiner suggests that art fails to represent the artist’s intended idea because the idealistic concept is not idealistically fulfilled by the reality of the actual created entity. In Dry Veins, this notion is expanded to include notions of transcendence versus transgression; life versus death; liminality (transformation): the subject matter dialectically presents an idealistic transcendence (and life) and a realistic transgression (and death) because the stone cutter’s idealistic vision of becoming united with their art and transcending into a desired life is compared with the realistic horror during the liminal transformation into stone and transgressing into a denser material and potential death." - Alannah Marie Halay (composer)