Seafarer Press | Elizabeth Alexander, composer

choral chamber vocal chamber orchestral piano

Order Music

Report a Performance

NEW CD AVAILABLE!

LEVEL   E = Easy
ME = Moderately Easy
  M = Medium
MD = Moderately Difficult
  D = Difficult

Adult Women Men Youth Children by theme/style by difficulty

Why I Pity the Woman Who Never Spills (Joan Wolf Prefontaine)

SSAA a cappella - SEA-058-00 - $4.50/copy
5 minutes - MD Commissioned by Cornell Chorus, Scott Tucker conductor — as part of the "No Whining, No Flowers" Commissioning Project for Women's Choirs

A gutsy, sensual blues setting of Joan Wolf Prefontaine's poem in praise of messy women.  Opening with contrapuntal waves of "spilling" words — spill, splatter, spot, spree, dribble, drabble, oozle — this piece is a rambunctious journey through a world of vocal inflections and joie de vivre, to be sung with both nuance and abandon.

Program Notes  and  Performance Notes

Score (excerpt)

Recording (excerpt)
(MP3, 1.4 MB, sung by Cornell University Chorus ~ Scott Tucker, conductor) A recording of this
piece is now available
on the CD:
Finally On My Way To Yes

Why I Pity the Woman Who Never Spills Music by Elizabeth Alexander
Poem by Joan Wolf Prefontaine
For she misses the luxury of dribbling
marinara sauce on white silk,

of merlot falling at uproarious dinner
parties onto beige lace tablecloths,

picnics where mustard, baked beans,
toasted marshmallows and melted

chocolate all leave their winsome,
gregarious stains on Levis and lips.

For she misses the thrill and mess of it all:
hands infatuated with bread dough,

logic blemished all day with sly innuendoes
and double entendres, the child in the lap

with the histrionic green lime popsicle kiss,
the kettle with its secret military spices

longing in its heart of heart to spill the beans,
mangos eaten au natural in bathtubs,

sweet-talking, profane juices softening
the millstones and milestones of the body,

the plum's intemperate noddings in a neighbor's
nonchalant field, tartness oozing like ink

across obeisant fingers, strawberries,
caught red-handed in golden-straw beds,

falling upwards towards one's mouth —
small, fierce advocates of sumptuous rendezvous.

I say to her: Spill, Spurt, Squirt, Splash, Splatter,
Spot, Spree, Sprinkle, Dribble, Drabble, Oozle,

Offend, Transcend, Transude, Transgress, Transpire,
Perspire, Percolate, Partake, Propagate, Create!

Copyright by Joan Wolf Prefontaine.  Reprinted by permission.

Why I Pity the Woman Who Never Spills - Score Scorch was designed by the folks who built Sibelius notation software, as a simple way to allow Sibelius scores to become webpages.  Despite its slightly ominous name, Scorch is free, is not excessively large (approx. 1 MB), and does not do anything demonic like put you on a mailing list or affect other computer programs. - E.A.

If you can't see the score after the file finishes loading, click here to download the Scorch plug-in.

Program Notes:  I'm not sure there's a woman anywhere who hasn't experienced pressure to act, look, sound, and perform flawlessly, which is why Joan Wolf Prefontaine's poem is funny and tragic and triumphant all at the same time.

It is only right that women should sing this song together, because we are both a reason for this pressure and a remedy for it.  Two experiences I had while writing this song underscored this truth for me.  One evening, I was chastised by a hostess for dripping a single drop of red wine onto her kitchen tablecloth — while two weeks earlier my friend Victoria had remarked that she particularly loved the stain on her car's ceiling, because she was almost certain that it was hot chocolate! -E.A.

Performance Notes:  As they become more and more familiar with this song, individual singers often begin adding blues inflections to some of the A-naturals, either flattening the pitches so that they lie "in the cracks," or singing the pitches as actual A-flats.  This is especially true in spots like m.85 ("Levis and lips") where the lyrics contains a little "attitude."  When I was composing this song, I considered writing some of these renegade A-naturals as A-flats, but I rejected that idea because they aren't true A-flats; they really are "blues-inflected-A-naturals!"

Although choral singing is usually about singers making their vocal production as similar as possible, this piece is not about conformity — so don't try to make your gals bend these pitches uniformly.  I suggest that they lean on those A-naturals with as much moxy as they feel on a given day, and see what happens!  -E.A.