I wrote this work thinking about Gyorgy Ligeti's wildly imaginative and inventive Sippal, dobbal, nadihegeduvel. In that set of songs, also for singer and percussion quartet, Ligeti uses nonsense poetry, an incredibly diverse battery of instruments, and all sorts of novel approaches in his musical language in what strikes me as an attempt to say something that he couldn't say through regular means. Ligeti grasps for the eternal and transcendent by turning away from the ordinary. To me, in the poem with gentle fingers, David Vogel similarly reaches for the eternal and transcendent, but instead by focusing inward on the ordinary Vogel turns to a quiet, contemplative scene, with an intimacy that is personal and private. The language of his poem is Hebrew - not his native, spoken language of Yiddish - but rather a literary language of thought and study. My work of the same name attempts to capture this intimate meditation with the percussionists playing gentle harmonies directly on to the strings of the piano as if embodying the rain drops described in the poem. The effect is meant to be rarefied and special, and yet a kind of magnification of the ordinary. For the majority of the work the singer listens silently along with the audience, in essence experiencing the poem before singing its rumination out loud as a song.
