The Water Is Warm > The Discovery Channel

for Soprano, Clarinet and Piano

• LEVEL: Professional, Advanced

• DURATION: 3′

• PREMIERE YEAR: 2016

• INSTRUMENTATION: cl, pno

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About the Work

TWINGE is inspired by survival stories from the Indonesian Tsunami, as told to Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Barry Bearak and published in “The Day The Sea Came” by The New York Times Magazine on Sunday, November 24, 2004. “For the earth, it was just a twinge. Last Dec. 26, at 7:59 a.m., one part of the planet’s undersea crust made an abrupt shift beneath another along a 750-mile seam near the island of Sumatra. The tectonic plates had been grating against each other for millenniums, and now the higher of the two was lifted perhaps 60 feet. For a planet where landmasses are in constant motion across geological time, the event was of no great moment. But for people — who mark the calendar in days and months rather than eons — a monumental catastrophe had begun, not only the largest earthquake in 40 years but also the displacement of billions of tons of water, unleashing a series of mammoth waves: a tsunami…” – Barry Bearak, in “The Day the Sea Came”, The New York Times, November 27, 2005 © 2005 The New York Times. All rights reserved.

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VIII. THE WATER IS WARM

The water is warm,

muddy and sulfurous.

It spins and jerks me.

I can’t see.

I struggle for breath.

I gulp some, salty and foul.

My arms are useless.

Objects strike me,

I feel cut, poked and punched.

Something smacks my left eye.

Then I stop.

My body upside down, pinned

against something flat –

a wall.

A car, or what seems a car

pushes against me

then slides away.

Finally, the wall breaks apart,

and the water pitches me to the surface.

I gulp for air.

IX. THE DISCOVERY CHANNEL

I look around.

I see only the tops of palm and mango trees.

Is this some new faraway place?

Is this the end of the world?

I recall the prophecy:

On Judgment Day, mountains will rise into the air

like balls of cotton.

But the mountain peaks are still solidly in place.

Perhaps instead, a natural disaster has done the damage.

A tsunami, it is called.

I know the term from the Discovery Channel.

Commissioned by Haven Trio through the Chamber Music America Classical Commissioning Program, with generous funding provided by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the Chamber Music America Endowment Fund.

© 2016 early antique music. All rights reserved. Lyrics for TWINGE adapted from “The Day the Sea Came” by Barry Bearak, from The New York Times, November 27, 2005 © 2005 The New York Times. All rights reserved. Used by permission and protected by the Copyright Laws of the United States. The printing, copying, redistribution, or retransmission of this Content without express written permission is prohibited.