La selva de los relojes

On a late summer visit to Cape Cod, while on the prerequisite visit to the Yellow Umbrella bookstore in Chatham, I found a volume of Federico Garcia Lorca’s collected poetry, with the intent of eventually finding some poems to set to music. Months later, I turned back to these poems and selected his suite “La selva de los relojes.” The fact that the poet thought of these poems as musical suites informed the music, as I attempted to connect all of the songs through key relationships and make them each like a distinct, imaginary dance. Of course, the ‘relojes’ tick-tock throughout the songs. The music, like the poems, is filled with clocks and stars and spiders and butterflies.