program note
I wrote i live in pain as a present for my friends Donald Nally and the excellent Philadelphia chorus The Crossing.’ The piece is a love song, and the text describes an intense longing for a lover who is no longer there. I was inspired to write the text by my attempts to read the works of the 12th century troubadour, Beatriz de Dia, often referred to as the Contessa de Dia, probably the most famous woman troubadour. I say my ‘attempts to read’ because she wrote in medieval Occitan, the antiquated version of a regional language of a small area in Southern France, which I don’t speak or read. Luckily I found a translation of some of her texts into Italian, which I also don’t really speak or read, but which I know at least well enough to push me in the direction of the text I finally made.
