Dusk is a set of five songs setting the words of five different English-language poets, written beginning in 2015 at the request of tenor Gerhard Siegel and pianist Gabriel Dobner, and completed in 2017. The poets include Neil Carpathios, Jane Kenyon, Rae Armantrout, Eavan Boland, and John Piller. What connects the poems to one another is the image of dusk appearing in different ways in each one. The image may suggest nostalgia, reflection, contemplation of mortality, indistinctness, illusion, or other connotations, depending on circumstance. The theme of change is also represented by the imagery of the poems, from the ever-changing river of Carpathios’s fanciful depiction of ancient Greece in the first song, to Piller’s return to a childhood home in the last. Mortality appears unexpectedly in Kenyon’s light-hearted and brief poem set in the second song, as it does in Boland’s heartbreaking recollection in the fourth song. The central song of Dusk sets Armantrout’s vivid, eponymous account of a moment of self
