Five Haiku

Five Haiku is something of a tragic - and happy - love story. A man sings about a woman who exists not in his life, but only, and very strongly, in his mind. He has been touched by her and cannot let her go from memory. He sings through all the emotions her memory evokes, both beautiful and painful - terribly saddened by her absence, yet so changed by the imprint she left that he knows, ultimately, he has been made wonderful by her.

Though the piece takes its title from the five haiku it sets, it opens and closes with a poem of its own. I used several structural devices to mirror the shape of a haiku - five syllables, seven, then five. I didn't use those specific numbers, but I did use that shape: short, long, short. The opening theme in the piano is built from three phrases in this short-long-short structure. That theme returns near the end, now voiced in the strings, with the same phrase shape. And in the larger architecture - opening idea, development, return - the piece as a whole traces that same short-long-short arc.

Five Haiku is a story about longing and letting go. We are always longing for something, and in a way, that longing is what keeps us moving forward toward what we can't quite reach. But when longing stops us instead - when it turns us around, away from what's ahead - it has to be let go. What follows is a kind of recognition: that everything in our lives, wonderful or terrible, changes us in ways we often don't see, and that those changes are, in the end, wonderful ones.