As I say in my talk on nature and my music later in this part, I encountered haiku poetry in the late 1950s. It had a purity that attracted me because it was not about people or ideas but about the act of perception itself. It was wonderful to find out a little later that Mel Powell had set a group of haiku in his Haiku Settings (1960), sung marvelously by Bethany Beardslee on a Son-Nova LP recording, along with his Filigree Setting for string quartet and works of Milton Babbitt. Over the years I returned to haiku in my compositional output. I worked on what became a compositional experiment, producing Haiku Mix for human speakers and tape (1971, retracted); a more successful outcome was my Haiku Cycle (1978) for soprano and piano dedicated to Lynn Webber, who was the first to sing Babbitt’s Phonemena in both the instrumental and tape version and recorded it on New Word Records in the mid 1970s.

In the 1980s I began to study Buddhist religious and philosophic texts seriously; this stimulated an appreciation of classical Chinese poetry and art that has continued until today. I found in the poetry of Wang Wei and others the roots of haiku, which pleased me greatly. This led me to become interested in the relation between poetry and landscape, so well merged in Chinese and Japanese poems. Eventually two compositions for soprano with instruments emerged. In 1985 I composed Wang River Cycle for soprano and seven instruments, an extended setting of Wang Wei’s famous collection of twelve occasional poems written about various locations on his estate on the Wang River and correlated to his painted scroll of the same place. The other piece was Cold Mountain Songs for soprano and piano of 1993, which I discuss here. Since then I have composed four other pieces for the voice on natural themes. Inscape (1996) is based on five poems by Gerard Manley Hopkins, written for Thomas Paul, basso, and the Eastman Philharmonia Orchestra. “Sung Song” (2002) sets four Zen koans from the Sung Dynasty and is an unaccompanied song composed especially for soprano Heather Gardner, and Wye: Lynes for Tintern Abbey for soprano and computergenerated sounds (2003) was written for Deborah Norin-Kuehn, who also premiered the Cold Mountain Songs.