{"id":804,"date":"2014-01-02T17:39:16","date_gmt":"2014-01-02T17:39:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/alzand.com\/?page_id=804"},"modified":"2026-02-03T09:49:31","modified_gmt":"2026-02-03T14:49:31","slug":"torches","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/alzand.com\/?page_id=804","title":{"rendered":"Karim Al-Zand: Music: Orange Torches Against the Rain"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n
\n

Orange Torches Against the Rain<\/h2>\n

songs of flowers and rain on poems by Amy Lowell<\/span><\/h5>\n

O<\/span>range Torches Against the Rain<\/i> is a song cycle for mezzo-soprano and piano on poems by American poet Amy Lowell (1874\u00961925), its verses drawn largely from her 1919 collection Pictures of the Floating World<\/i>. The eleven short poems in the cycle are united by their naturalistic imagery and by their shared references to flowers and rain. Lowell was a major figure in the so-called \u201cimagist\u201d movement, an early 20th century Anglo-American school of poetry that rejected the prolix sentiment and metrical forms of Romantic poetry, in favor of free verse written in a crisp, economical, yet highly descriptive style.
\n\"image\"Lowell’s poems are compact, focused and direct\u0097she believed \u201cconcentration is of the very essence of poetry\u201d\u0097and often feature a single striking image. The settings in Orange Torches aim to complement the concise and elegant character of Lowell\u2019s originals, to capture what Ezra Pound, another imagist, called \u201can intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time.\u201d Lowell employs what she termed \u201cpolyphonic prose\u201d in her poems, a technique that replaces regular metric structure with an idiosyncratic formal design created by alliteration, assonance and occasional rhyme.<\/p>\n

Lowell\u2019s scholarly work includes adaptations of ancient Chinese poetry, an interest often reflected in her own poems, which frequently echo Asian poetry in their atmosphere, subject matter and form. (Her work includes some of the earliest English-language examples of Japanese tanka and haiku\u2014for an example, see song no. 2.) Amy Lowell was awarded the Pulitzer Prize posthumously in 1926. Orange Torches Against the Rain<\/i> was written for and premiered by mezzo-soprano Aidan Soder<\/a>.<\/br><\/p>\n

SCORE + RECORDING VIDEO<\/p>\n