Five Ecstatic Poems of Kabir

Five Ecstatic Poems of Kabir is a song cycle for soprano, flute, clarinet, percussion, and piano, completed in 1989, with texts by a fifteenth-century Indian poet and Sufi mystic. It was composed while I was an artist-in-residence at the Zen Mountain Monastery in Mount Tremper, New York. There is a literal Buddhist touch in the Tibetan cymbals that open the work (sounding D and E-flat), providing, according to Feigin, “the tonal language from which it emerges.” The cymbals return in the third song. In both cases they set a mood of ecstatic delirium, picked up by the rippling flute in the first song and frenetically oscillating instrumental figures in the third. But Buddhism resonates from another aspect of the piece—the contemplative peacefulness of the second song and the radiantly sonorous chords at the end. The five songs flow together, with the fourth an instrumental rendering of the poem’s evocation of a storm. Originally written for contralto Dorothea Brinkmann, the cycle was revised in 1995 for soprano Christine Schadeberg.