Waiting for Daylight
excerpts from the orchestral score
for soprano and piano, text by Anne Shelby
(1997 / 2015) Duration: 7:00
Premiere performance by Emily Yocum Black (soprano) and Krista Wallace Boaz (piano)
Waiting for Daylight is a musical story about domestic violence, using a text by Kentucky author Anne Shelby. This piano/vocal, extracted version reduces the twenty-five minute orchestral work (1997) to about seven minutes. In the complete text, the protagonist eventually kills her abusive husband, and, at the end of both versions, she stands in the prison yard and hopefully sings of being with her children again. Most of the more violent music and text has been omitted from this version. What remains is a more suggestive story, a more reflective telling, more an implication than an explicit drama. Still, the heart of the story unfolds.
Steve Rouse – July 2015
”I was like you a child, full of light.
I dreamed about butterflies and starlight and swirling dresses and someday a house on a wide green lot and children I'd raise on lullabies and lemon drops a man, a man with gentle hands gentle hands. Do you take this man to be your husband, to have to hold, to honor and obey, from this day forward till death do you part? I do. I do. Knowing now where the road leads I would turn back. But then, in the daily dance of waking, sleeping, children, awash with love loyalty blind hope always on the brink of hell and a bright tomorrow... how could I know? I needed to believe. Once more I call for help. Once more someone comes, then goes again. Once more a door shuts behind them. Here there is silence. Then finally a siren, somewhere far away. I stand in the yard with the others, feel the sun on my arms. I listen for music. I wait for daylight, and dream of a house on a wide green lot, my children with me, singing, safe. Ah… ah… some sweet day.”
(extracted from the full text by Anne Shelby)